Daryna Antoniuk reports:
The founder of the popular messaging app Telegram stated that the recently announced updates to the platform’s terms of service don’t represent a big change in how it interacts with law enforcement, as the company has been disclosing criminal data to authorities for years.
“My previous post may have seemed to announce a major shift in how Telegram works. But in reality, little has changed,” Pavel Durov said in a statement on Wednesday.
Last week, Durov said Telegram would provide the IP addresses and phone numbers of rule violators to relevant authorities in an effort to discourage “bad actors” from “jeopardizing the integrity” of the platform.
In the latest statement, he explained that the practice of disclosing the IP addresses and phone numbers of “dangerous criminals” had been in place long before last week. For this to occur, the company needed to receive a “properly formed legal request” and “conduct its legal analysis.”
Read more at The Record.