The head of Telegram, Pavel Durov, has been charged by the French judiciary for allegedly allowing criminal activity on the messaging app but avoided jail with a €5m bail.
The Russian-born multi-billionaire, who has French citizenship, was granted release on condition that he report to a police station twice a week and remain in France, Paris prosecutor Laure Beccuau said in a statement.
The charges against Durov include complicity in the spread of sexual images of children and a litany of other alleged violations on the messaging app.
His surprise arrest has put a spotlight on the criminal liability of Telegram, the popular app with around 1 billion users, and has sparked debate over free speech and government censorship.
Yeah, I’m siding with the French government on this one at first blush. E2EE platforms are a necessary tool for combating government overreach and corporate surveillance. But if you willingly make a platform that’s not E2EE, the idea of users being able to share this vile shit being a “necessary evil” toward the greater societal good completely falls apart. If you 1) have this vile content on your platform, 2) know it exists, 3) can trivially combat it in a targeted manner, and 4) choose not to, then you’re complicit in its distribution.
I have no sympathy for a CEO who tries to dupe their userbase into believing their app is private and then not even take advantage of the one single ethical benefit to the platform not being E2EE.
Not to whatabout it but under this logic we got other "CEO"s who should see a similar treatment.
Will they?
bootlicker much? would you also be excited if Russia arrests Proton CEO for dubious reasons or is your reasoning based on ideology and tribalism?
That’s a wild way of twisting the logic. Just because the platform doesn’t fall under your e2ee definition doesn’t mean they had to do something that is only possible on purely cloud services.
The reason for arrest doesn’t even have anything to do with encryption. All content that facilitates mentioned crimes is public. Handling it shouldn’t involve any backdoors or otherwise service-side decryption.
It is about encryption though. Since it’s possible for him to get access to anything said in those group chats, they asked him to provide all Telegram has on those users and chats. He didn’t, he got arrested.
He wouldn’t have been in as much trouble if those chats were encrypted and Telegram couldn’t know anything about what’s said in what chat by which user.
Because hw wouldn’t be “betraying” his users by giving everything that was asked of him by the authorities.
Again, the materials are in public groups. Anyone with an account can see them. If we imagine that Telegram had the same functionality as it does now over E2EE, the offending users would be sharing their keys in public, and Telegram would still be as viable.
Telegram deserves some pushback for misrepresenting themselves as secure (and for lying about their connections to Russia), but I wish Moxie fanboys were able to talk about Telegram without shouting “it’s not E2EE” over and over because they don’t understand it’s a social network disguised as a messenger.
Assuming things should work that way is ignorant. According to you, service owners should design and redesign their services to not store any data in order to avoid arrests. Also that a service owner should invent stuff they might not had a plan for if they have even a theoretical possibility to help identify individual users, in other words go against policies they designed at some point.
After reading the article and the links in the article, I’m not seeing anywhere where they stated the chats there requesting information on were public chats, did you have a source that discussed that I could read up on? It sounds fairly interesting to me.
No, just personal experience (I use telegram for many years) and absence of server data implications anywhere across the issues in the past (at this time too). You can find questionable or illegal businesses in telegram with a few words, they are all public channels. Hence “no moderation” accuses mentioned in every article.
There are of course darknet-like private communities, but I assume they are not a subject of interest at this time. Authorities would need to dig very deep past all the obvious illegal stuff, and telegram shouldn’t care about resources consumed by such a small chunk of user base. Those groups will stay, as they are, private and safe, I assume, for quite some time.
