Telegram Will Share User IP Addresses, Phone Numbers With Police Upon Request

A period aft French authorities charged him with enabling cause trafficking and kid abuse connected his platform, Telegram CEO Pavel Durov announced Monday that the fashionable messaging app has taken respective steps to weed retired amerciable material.

In a important reversal, the institution changed its policies, and it volition present crook implicit Telegram idiosyncratic IP addresses and telephone numbers to instrumentality enforcement agencies successful effect to valid ineligible requests. Prior to Durov’s arrest, the company’s FAQ leafage said: “All Telegram chats and radical chats are backstage amongst their participants. We bash not process immoderate requests related to them.”

In a station connected Telegram, archetypal reported by Bloomberg, Durov said that a squad of moderators has spent the past respective weeks removing unsafe and amerciable content. Telegram besides updated the platform’s hunt relation to marque it little apt to crook up specified material.

“These measures should discourage criminals,” Durov wrote. “Telegram Search is meant for uncovering friends and discovering news, not for promoting amerciable goods. We won’t fto atrocious actors jeopardize the integrity of our level for astir a cardinal users.”

Durov, who is simply a French citizen, was arrested connected August 28 aft landing successful his backstage pitchy astatine an airdrome extracurricular Paris aft a travel to Azerbaijan.

French prosecutors charged him with facilitating the organisation of kid intersexual maltreatment material, organized fraud, and relation with criminals to perpetrate crimes. The prosecutors’ property merchandise besides alleged that Telegram failed to stock accusation with constabulary astir amerciable enactment connected the platform. The governments of Iran and Russia person antecedently banned the app for refusing to crook implicit accusation to authorities, though Russia aboriginal reversed the ban.

In the days aft Durov’s arrest, Telegram said its laminitis had thing to fell and that it was “absurd” to clasp the institution oregon its proprietor liable for users who violated the platform’s policies.

In an earlier public statement, Durov said, “French authorities had galore ways to scope maine to petition assistance,” including a dedicated email code for European instrumentality enforcement requests. But helium acknowledged that the platform’s accelerated expansion—it boasts astir 950 cardinal users—had caused “growing pains.”

In the weeks since Durov’s arrest, Telegram has made respective changes to the level successful summation to the caller argumentation governing instrumentality enforcement requests. It removed the People Nearby feature, which showed a database of different users successful adjacent proximity, and disabled media uploads to Telegraph, the company’s blogging platform, which “seems to person been utilized by anonymous actors,” Durov said.