Telegram CEO Pavel Durov today defended recent changes to his platform, amid concerns his arrest in France has made the messaging app more compliant with legal requests to share user data with the authorities.
Durov attempted to minimize the significance of changes made to the app since he was arrested in August and charged with complicity in a range of crimes, including spreading sexual images of children. He was forbidden from leaving France for six months and must appear at a police station twice a week.
In his post, the 39-year-old indirectly addressed speculation that Telegram may strengthen its notoriously light-touch content moderation as a result of his arrest. “Our core principles haven’t changed,” Durov stressed, in a post on the platform. “We’ve always strived to comply with relevant local laws—as long as they didn’t go against our values of freedom and privacy.”
He attributed a recent uptick in the number of EU legal requests received and considered valid by the app over the last several months to European authorities beginning to use the correct Telegram email address.
Yet since Durov’s arrest, Telegram has introduced a series of subtle changes. In late August, the company’s FAQ page read: “To this day, we have disclosed 0 bytes of user data to third parties, including governments.” Now the phrase “user data” has been replaced with “user messages.” Telegram did not reply to WIRED’s request for comment asking what exactly this change means.
Then, early in September, Telegram quietly made it possible for users to report illegal content in private and group chats for moderators to review. Later that same month, Durov also announced Telegram had changed its terms of service to prevent the app’s abuse by criminals and would share user locations in response to legal requests. “We’ve made it clear that the IP addresses and phone numbers of those who violate our rules can be disclosed to relevant authorities,” he said at the time.
Today, Durov framed those changes as a technicality. “Since 2018, Telegram has been able to disclose IP addresses/phone numbers of criminals to authorities,” he explained. Although last week he said that privacy policies in different countries had been “unified,” he insisted that “in reality, little has changed.”
What has changed, however, is Durov’s tone. For years, Telegram cultivated an image as a proudly anti-authority platform that was politically neutral, while governments and digital rights groups bemoaned how difficult it was to contact its moderators.
Now, there are signs Durov is adopting a more conciliatory attitude toward the authorities. That has prompted panic among some of the app’s less savory users, including German extremists and Russian military bloggers, who have expressed concern that the CEO’s arrest may be an attempt to access their data. Durov’s message today carried yet another warning to them. “We do not allow criminals to abuse our platform or evade justice,” he said.
