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.
A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.
Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.
In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.
Some Rules
- Posting a link to a website containing tracking isn’t great, if contents of the website are behind a paywall maybe copy them into the post
- Don’t promote proprietary software
- Try to keep things on topic
- If you have a question, please try searching for previous discussions, maybe it has already been answered
- Reposts are fine, but should have at least a couple of weeks in between so that the post can reach a new audience
- Be nice :)
Related communities
Chat rooms
-
[Matrix/Element]Dead
much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)
- 0 users online
- 57 users / day
- 383 users / week
- 1.5K users / month
- 5.7K users / 6 months
- 1 subscriber
- 2.82K Posts
- 70.8K Comments
- Modlog
So to make it clear, it’s because their company actually holds some data for clients that these governments want access to - because telegram is not peer-to-peer, unless you set a chat to private.
In essence Telegram as a company holds a lot of data that the French authorities want access to…
This comment brought to you by the Signal gang.
Signal fans are annoying Fuck
Quiet, youngin. I was there when the tracking algorithms that are currently canvasing your stupid ass was made. Listen to your elders.
shut up boomer
Imbecile.
Nobody is coming after Signal because nobody uses Signal. Telegram has a user base of almost 1 billion.
I think Signal is liked by the US government. I doubt it would be targeted. Also the US has laws protecting platforms.
Yeah. A lot of people use Facebook and TikTok too, yet here we are on Lemmy. How many users are there here?
I love lemmy, but it’s irrelevant on the big picture. Same with Signal.
If you want to continue using Signal, you should fight for the right of others to use Telegram. “First they came for them and I said nothing”. The EU and others are trying hard to control people’s private messaging.
Even better: tell people about Briar. It isn’t for everyone but if people are really concerned it is the right answer. Briar has issues with convenience but that can be mitigated somewhat.
It’s not a fight, it’s logic. The world governments can do nothing to OpenWhisperSystems (the makers of Signal), because they don’t store any communication.
Telegram however thought they were smart, by storing data and splitting that data up in to several different pieces around the world, assuming governments wouldn’t collude together to get it.
But they didn’t foresee the litigious nature of nation states, and that’s what we’re seeing now. If these nation states also start to collude with one another, everyone who thought they were safe are gonna get fucked.
Signal does not store any communication data. They only facilitate handshake between clients and the clients manage the data between themselves.
This is why Telegram isn’t safe, but Signal is.
They World governments want to ban Signal and make it illegal to use it. That’s the problem.
The wOrLd GuBmInTs is such a huge umbrella that it must mean it’ll rain the Atlantic Ocean.
WESTERN GOVERNMENTS are allowed to go against privacy and encryption because of stupid Karen’s screaming “won’t somebody please think of the children” and old fops going “basically terrorists” and not a single one of them have considered the decentralisation principle as an actual barrier, because their constituency allows it, because their constituency is technically illiterate.
EASTERN GOVERNMENTS are largely authoritarian. Sorry, world, but I’m not in the mood to piss about here.
THE GLOBAL SOUTH gets bundled together as well, because no one there has the resources to actually prevent the spread of encryption software, much to the shegrin of western governments, who tried to sanction that shit, but got overridden by people who took a plane ride with aa USB stick.
Again, PGP over email is still unbreakable and can be used as well, incl with private email servers, or even Matrix servers. You don’t need Telegram or Signal. The “whose next” problem relies on the idea that you and I are the only people who know of these problems, and that’s kind of arrogant.
M’buru Ufufu is on that plane right now, with tons of encryption software on a USB stick, the UN be damned. UMA LELE, UMA LELE~!
Just a side note: PGP doesn’t use any form for forward secrecy so if someone gets your keys you are hosed.
Better encryption out there these days.
True, but if you lose your keys you’re sort of screwed anyways. But yeah, forward secrecy ftw.
With forward secrecy the keys are destroyed after decryption. The messages then live on your device. If you delete those messages they are gone. Eve (the evil eavesdropper) can not decrypt stored encrypted messages even if they steal your device. The keys rotate and you can not generate previous decryption keys.