Privacy

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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.

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Telegram CEO charged in France for ‘allowing criminal activity’ on messaging app (www.theguardian.com)

submitted 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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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.

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 3 weeks ago (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 weeks ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

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.

If they don't want to be arrested yes, they should either do that or have good enough moderation to not get in the bad graces of some big entities like countries.

I'm not sure what you meant with the rest of your comment.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

I mean the basic logic of the service was designed somewhere before its release. Data policies, promises to users are nothing if you assume services should adapt to stuff like this, at the expense of breaking those policies and promises.

Here is an old article from telegram about reasons for how it works https://telegra.ph/Why-Isnt-Telegram-End-to-End-Encrypted-by-Default-08-14

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 weeks ago

The thing is I think he did think of stuff like this.
From what the article says and from what I knew. Telegram purposefuly made "distributed cross-jurisdictional encrypted cloud storage" to try and evade governments. So he did have them in mind.
If we lived in a world where we didn't have to think about governments spying on us, we might have not even needed encryption to begin with.

But thank you for the link, it was an interesting read even if I don't agree with what he's trying to convey / prove.