> Does Telegram let them see it: I don't think so.
This is exceptionally naive. Even if he was arrested for not sharing with the French, what about for other countries? Was he arrested for not ever sharing or not sharing enough? Even if he, personally, has never shared, that doesn’t say anything about his employees who have the same access to these systems.
Your data is not private with Telegram. You are trusting Telegram. It is a trust-based app, not a cryptographically secure app.
If you trust telegram, that’s your choice, but just because a person says the right words in interviews doesn’t mean your data is safe.
You cannot be sure and yet Telegram often gets mentioned for being the only platform where states do not have easy access to user information or the ability to censor certain messages/content.
So from a broad perspective, they probably behave better than comparable services.
I think Telegram should not be trusted, but I also do not trust the alternatives, that readily share information with states. A special focus for me is that my own jurisdiction does not have access to my social media content. Other countries are secondary at first.
> Telegram often gets mentioned for being the only platform where states do not have easy access to user information or the ability to censor certain messages/content.
Following the St. Petersburg attack, the Federal Security Service (FSB), in an event that may ring somewhat familiar to many in the United States and Europe, asked Telegram for encryption keys to decode the dead attacker’s messages. Telegram said it couldn’t give the keys over because it didn’t have them. In response, Russia’s internet and media regulator said the company wasn’t complying with legal requirements. The court-ordered ban on accessing Telegram from within Russia followed shortly thereafter. Telegram did, though, enact a privacy policy in August 2018 where it could hand over terror suspects’ user information (though not encryption keys to their messages) if given a court order.
...
... Pavel Durov, Telegram’s founder, called on Russian authorities on June 4 to lift the ban. He cited ongoing Telegram efforts to significantly improve the removal of extremist propaganda from the platform in ways that don’t violate privacy, such as setting a precedent of handing encryption keys to the FSB.
This doesn't make any sense. Either the author of the article is confused, lying, or is drawing conclusions from source material that is untrue.
In the US case, there was a phone where data was encrypted at rest. Though Apple was capable of creating and signing a firmware update that would have made it easier for the FBI to brute force the password, Apple refused to do so.
In the Russian case, the FSB must have already had access to the suspect's phone because if it did not then Telegram would not be in any position to help at all.
So, the FSB must have already had access. And therefore, by having access to the phone they also had complete access to the suspect's chats in plaintext, regardless of whether or not the suspect used Telegram's private chat. There would have been no keys to ask Telegram for copies of.
Alternatively, the FSB might have had access to some other user's chats with the suspect, and wanted Telegram to turn over the suspect's full data. Telegram is 100% able to do that if they want to.
As the specific part of the article you have quoted is definitely bullshit, I suspect the rest of it is bullshit too and that despite what Roskomnadzor states in public, the real fight with Durov was over censorship.
This is exceptionally naive. Even if he was arrested for not sharing with the French, what about for other countries? Was he arrested for not ever sharing or not sharing enough? Even if he, personally, has never shared, that doesn’t say anything about his employees who have the same access to these systems.
Your data is not private with Telegram. You are trusting Telegram. It is a trust-based app, not a cryptographically secure app.
If you trust telegram, that’s your choice, but just because a person says the right words in interviews doesn’t mean your data is safe.