Mr. Pavel Durov, founder of the messaging app Telegram, said that his company is willing to help any country in its investigations into terrorist attacks, or almost all of them, as there is one country that is not given that luxury: Russia.
Essentially, Telegram's new privacy settings allow investigators with a court order to obtain the personal data of app users as part of an investigation.
" If we receive a court order that one of our users is suspected of terrorism, we may disclose their IP address and phone number to the authorities . So far, this has not happened. If such a case arises in the future, the procedure we will follow will be highly transparent," Pavel Durov said, among other things.
The information that will be provided to the competent authorities of the states in case of request will comply with the requirements of the European GDPR.
Russia:
Telegram was banned in Russia in 2018 after Durov refused to provide local intelligence agencies with access to user chats. It should be noted, however, that the blocking can be easily circumvented with VPN apps and similar services.
"Russia had essentially asked Telegram to gain access to all users' messages, not just phone numbers or IP addresses. As expected, we could not agree to this request," the app's founder stressed.
