Telegram says it will provide user data to authorities in major policy shift
Telegram CEO Pavel Duvrov is discovering the benefits of hiring people who aren’t technical engineers. He was recently charged in France with complicity in criminal activity on the platform. He has announced that the company will now comply with law enforcement requests for user data.
As noted by 404 Media (via BBC News), the messaging platform normally only has a clause in its terms of service stating that it will only cooperate with law enforcement on criminal activities related to terrorism. But that now appears to be changing.
Duvrov said in a Telegram message that such a change “should discourage criminals,” though he was quick to add that “while 99.999% of Telegram users have nothing to do with crime, the 0.001% involved in illegal activity creates a bad image for the entire platform, endangering the interests of our nearly billion users.”
Implications for Telegram user data
A “dedicated team of moderators” will now scour the platform to remove offensive material, Duvrov said, but some researchers are not convinced this will satisfy lawmakers.
Daphne Keller of Stanford University’s Center for Internet and Society noted that some countries require platforms to send notifications about particularly egregious material, such as material depicting child abuse.
“It sounds like a commitment that is likely to be less than what law enforcement wants,” the BBC reported.
While it’s good in principle that Telegram is now cooperating with law enforcement in combating crimes like abuse and harassment, making it a safer place for all users, the new changes to the terms of service will likely make Telegram much more dangerous for political dissidents.
John-Scott Railton, a senior researcher at the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab, acknowledges that the platform once “attracted people who wanted to feel safe sharing their political views in places like Russia, Belarus, and the Middle East,” but that those same people are “now scrutinizing Telegram’s announcement with a fundamental question in mind: Does this mean the platform will cooperate with authorities in repressive regimes?”
These people, it must be stressed, are not the far-right ‘activists’ who organised violent riots in England last summer, and deserve our sympathy. However, platforms must be safe from criminals at a basic level.
Ultimately, genuine, persecuted dissidents should not feel the need to rely on centralized platforms to disseminate information and their own personal experiences. It is true that such platforms have built-in audiences, but if those audiences are there primarily for social or even criminal purposes, they are probably not the right audiences.