The cleanup of social network Telegram is continuing, following the arrest in France of its founder Pavel Durov. Since that turn of events, Durov has back-tracked on Telegram being a platform on which anything goes, saying it does in fact moderate and remove harmful content, and cooperates with authorities.
Now, Durov has come out on Telegram to say this is nothing new, and the platform has been able to disclose IP addresses and phone numbers "of criminals" to authorities.
This in accordance with Telegram's privacy policy in most countries (Durov didn't say which ones).
"Whenever we received a properly formed legal request via relevant communication lines, we would verify it and disclose the IP addresses/phone numbers of dangerous criminals. This process had been in place long before last week," Durov said.
He then went on to outline recent legal requests from different economies around the world.
What's different now, Durov said, is that Telegram has "unified" its privacy policy across different countries. The platform which Durov said was built to protect activists and ordinary people from corrupt governments and corporations (!) will not allow criminals to abuse it.
That Telegram has been able to hand over potentially identifying user details as per above since 2018 may come as news to some of its members. The privacy policy outlining that was amended just over a week ago.
It could be that the disclosure of user details has been in place at Telegram longer than what's been apparent.
On the very good Risky Biz podcast former United States National Security Agency cybersecurity director Rob Joyce pointed to Russia's strict law called "System for Operative Investigative Activities" (SORM) suggesting it was very clear that Durov had reached some sort of agreement with the authorities of that nation.
Joyce also mentioned public statements from the Russian government that Telegram had installed unspecified equipment to monitor "all dangerous subjects", which does seem rather broad.
6 Comments
And this is why social media is eating itself because of the endlessly demonstrated untrustworthiness, and why the things of value move behind pay-walls.
The web's promise of a global town square looks to be meeting a slow and dismal end, leaving it fit only for a limited range of functions around buying and selling things to each other becasue of the value accrued by the few early movers who treat users (aka the public) as nothing more than profitable data generators.
100%. But alas even the web's utilitarian function of being a marketplace is potentially coming to a close. With the amount of fraud and the arbitrary steps e-commerce operators use to "address" this issue. For eg I have a PO Box as my bank contact address and on a regular basis my online orders get cancelled because my billing address and delivery address is different. Plus the tracking of this information by shady big business & governments.
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