Telegram, the popular messaging service, announced on Monday that it will now share users’ IP addresses and phone numbers if it receives a legitimate legal request from authorities, marking a shift in its privacy policy.
“If Telegram receives a valid order from the relevant judicial authorities that confirms you’re a suspect in a case involving criminal activities that violate the Telegram Terms of Service, we will perform a legal analysis of the request and may disclose your IP address and phone number to the relevant authorities,” Telegram wrote in its updated Privacy Policy on Monday.
“If any data is shared, we will include such occurrences in a quarterly transparency report published at: https://t.me/transparency.”
This latest change made by the company follows the arrest of Pavel Durov, Founder and CEO of Telegram, by authorities in France last month over his alleged failure to cooperate with law enforcement regarding his platform being used for illicit activity such as drug trafficking and the distribution of child exploitation materials.
In a post on his Telegram channel on Monday, Durov said that the company is making the changes to deter criminals from abusing Telegram Search. He added that Telegram Search is meant to find friends and discover news, but “bad actors” exploit it to promote illegal goods.
To apply some moderation to the content, Durov said that the company has been using AI (artificial intelligence) and a dedicated team of moderators over the last few weeks to remove the “problematic content” from its Telegram Search results to make it much safer. If the users still come across unsafe and illegal content in Telegram Search, Durov has requested that they report it to the team so that it can be removed.
“We won’t let bad actors jeopardize the integrity of our platform for almost a billion users,” Durov added.
Previously, Telegram’s law enforcement was only applicable to terror suspects. The popular messaging app said that it would disclose the user’s IP address and phone number to the relevant authorities if it received a court order confirming that the user was a terror suspect.
There is no clarity on how much information will be disclosed to law enforcement or how the changes will affect the messaging platform’s popularity. Despite the privacy policy update, Telegram maintains that it does not share user messages with any third parties, including governments, and has strong features like disappearing messages and end-to-end encryption for users’ data privacy.
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