Pavel Durov Is an Unreliable Narrator ⇥ t.me

It has been a little more than a month since Telegram CEO Pavel Durov was arrested and charged in France, and he has spent September trying to explain authorities’ interest and Telegram’s response.

Only one problem: I am not sure how much I can believe him. But I can only explain that by starting with his most recent posts.

Durov, on September 23:

To further deter criminals from abusing Telegram Search, we have updated our Terms of Service and Privacy Policy, ensuring they are consistent across the world. We’ve made it clear that the IP addresses and phone numbers of those who violate our rules can be disclosed to relevant authorities in response to valid legal requests.

And on October 2:

Since 2018, Telegram has been able to disclose IP addresses/phone numbers of criminals to authorities, according to our Privacy Policy in most countries.

Whenever we received a properly formed legal request via relevant communication lines, we would verify it and disclose the IP addresses/phone numbers of dangerous criminals. This process had been in place long before last week.

According to Durov, this is not “a major shift in how Telegram works”. It lines up with reporting in Der Spiegel, though further reporting called into question Telegram’s ongoing compliance with investigations. But earlier this year, Telegram claimed in its FAQ to reveal nothing at all about its users ever:

To this day, we have disclosed 0 bytes of user data to third parties, including governments.

Today, the same frequently asked question has a different word in it. See if you can spot it:

To this day, we have disclosed 0 bytes of user messages to third parties, including governments.

I do not know what to make of this. There is a vast difference, in my mind, between “0 bytes of user data” — which would include things like IP addresses and phone numbers — and “0 bytes of user messages”. Perhaps this was just poor wording in the earlier version — if so, it feels misleading. If I were some crime lord, I would see that as reassurance Telegram reveals nothing, especially with its reputation.

Let us now rewind to Durov on September 5:

Last month I got interviewed by police for 4 days after arriving in Paris. I was told I may be personally responsible for other people’s illegal use of Telegram, because the French authorities didn’t receive responses from Telegram.

Durov says, in effect, this is the fault of the French government because it did not use the correct channels for information requests, and French law enforcement could have just chatted with him to find out more.

I do not know whether I can believe him. From the outside, it looks like Telegram was habitually uncooperative with law enforcement on legitimate investigative grounds. It turned over some data to German authorities but realized users hated that, so it did one of two things: it deceived authorities, or it deceived users. Neither one is good. But I bet French authorities would not be charging a high-profile executive with such egregious crimes if they did not think they could prove it. I understand being skeptical of charges like these and I am not condemning Durov without proof. But I do not believe Durov either.