Telegram to comply with User Data requests

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In its new Terms of Service & Privacy Policy, Telegram states that it is willing to disclose the IP addresses and phone numbers of violating users to law enforcement concerning a “valid legal demand.” The update follows one month after the Telegram application was banned in Oman and the arrest of the Telegram CEO in France.

Yesterday, Pavel Durov, founder and CEO of Telegram announced the changes on his official Telegram channel. He said that criminals have seized the Telegram Search tool which allows the search of people, channels and bots and turned it into a black market for goods.

Telegram Search is not designed to search sites for buying cigarettes and drugs or promoting any type of forbidden products.” There will be no attempt to turnTelegram into a fake news distributor for 750M people,” is how Durov justified the move. Telegram goes by ‘phone numbers and IP addresses of the offenders’ if legal requests received are genuine and from anywhere in the world. In the case that the legal request is legitimate, Telegram will “carry out a legal review.” The company says it wants to release quarterly transparency reports that disclose every legal request that is granted to the firm.

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Durov has also hired a team of moderators and algorithms to cleanse the search area of Telegram. The team has begun by pulling down some illicit content from Search and they are also imploring app users whose bad detectors sense anything suspicious, to report it. Telegram has developed the @SearchReport bot which will receive such reports that the moderator team will work with.

Telegram has historically been cooperative only “partially” with the legal demands received from the authorities. Last month, French police arrested and detained Telegram CEO Pavel Durov, who has French citizenship, for four days because the app mentioned above violated legal demands associated with money mule operations, drug distribution, and human trafficking. Since his arrest, the billionaire founder attributed non-compliance to the company’s rapid growth, opining that “Telegram’s abrupt rise in subscribers to 950M created organizational issues enabling criminals to exploit our platforms easily.”

Source: Telegram