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.
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.
It would not be the same, access might remain public but if it was E2EE and not stored on Telegram’s servers, new users wouldn’t have access to the history of the channel.
And since Telegram would not be able to read the messages as they go through its servers, they would have plausible deniability if they were asked if they knew what was going on on which channels.
I don’t think Signal is the best messenger out there, I do think it’s an good compromise between privacy and to have a enough appeal that most people would use it. I don’t agree with most of what I have read Moxie write. But thanks for judging and generalizing by guessing who I must be.
You are right that it’s probably more of a social network.
