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.
After reading the article and the links in the article, I’m not seeing anywhere where they stated the chats there requesting information on were public chats, did you have a source that discussed that I could read up on? It sounds fairly interesting to me.
No, just personal experience (I use telegram for many years) and absence of server data implications anywhere across the issues in the past (at this time too). You can find questionable or illegal businesses in telegram with a few words, they are all public channels. Hence “no moderation” accuses mentioned in every article.
There are of course darknet-like private communities, but I assume they are not a subject of interest at this time. Authorities would need to dig very deep past all the obvious illegal stuff, and telegram shouldn’t care about resources consumed by such a small chunk of user base. Those groups will stay, as they are, private and safe, I assume, for quite some time.