oh boy I knew it wouldn't be long after telegram's CEO was arrested in France in relation to crimes that people were committing on the messaging platform that the company would switch up their policy of not ever complying with government data request the first update from pavl durov came on September 5th when he made a post in his telegram Channel where he thanked everyone for their love and support over the past few weeks and talked about how crazy it was is that the French government skipped the usual channels of talking to telegram's Legal Representatives about the
activities on the platform and they basically just kidnapped him when his plane landed and interrogated him for 4 days and he talked about the difficulties with running a private messaging service and also complying with these law enforcement requests for data that are coming from different countries later on there was another announcement about features being added to the chat platform and some old ones that were being abused a lot being taken away like the people nearby feature and Telegraph media uploads but then just the other day there was an update to telegram's privacy policy in section
8.3 law enforcement authorities it now reads if telegram receives a valid order from the relevant judicial author authorities that confirms you're a suspect in a case involving criminal activities that violate the telegram terms of service we will perform a legal analysis of the request and may disclose your IP address and phone number to the relevant authorities if any data is shared we will include such occurrences in a quarterly transparency report published at this telegram link which we're going to take a look at in a moment now let's compare this to the prior policy that telegram
had just a couple days ago which said if telegram receives a court order that confirms you're a terror suspect we may disclose your IP address and phone number to the relevant authorities so far this has never happened okay this is the key word remember this uh but when it does we will include it in a semiannual transparency report uh published at that same telegram link so so that has gone from semiannual to now quarterly uh transparency postings but here's the thing if you actually follow um this link through to that chat room with the telegram
bot it tells us that the bot is still being updated with current data at least that's what it tells you if you try to use it so my guess is there's probably a backlog of transparency reports uh that need to be published here in this chat room so telegram is now officially trying to clean up the platform of illegal activities or more specifically activities that are recognized as illegal in the majority of countries but they're still sticking by their distributed infastructure claims that keep messages and the contents of messages secret and safe but there's still
going to be a whole lot of criminals uh caught on telegram by the IP and phone number disclosures uh that are going to be coming out of them and and I'm sure have already come out of them but just haven't been updated in the transparency report bot yet now technically people could use a VPN on Telegram and I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of telegram um users are connected to some type of VPN because everyone and their mother knows about them now but anonymizing your phone number that is really difficult you might be able
to verify a telegram account with a Google Voice or a text now number or some other type of temporary phone number but services like that usually require a real phone number to sign up for and they absolutely disclose who signs up to them upon law enforcement inquiries and even if you do something like get a burner phone and you buy it with cash in a back alley somewhere that can still be Associated to you if you're not practicing good obsc with that phone if it's always connecting to the same cell towers that your main phone
is and those two phones can always be triangulated to the exact same location then it's going to be pretty safe to say that the same person owns both of these devices you might be able to mitigate this by storing your burner phone in a signal blocking bag like these ones that I sell on my website base. whenn and you also have to make sure that you only use the burner phone to get those verification messages or whatever when you're far away from home in your personal devices but needless to say most telegram users are not
practicing really good phone number opsac which means a lot of people are going to be investigated now one of the main features uh that people use telegram for are the group chats and in these group chats you can see the usernames of everyone that has joined the group so all that law enforcement really needs to do now is find the illicit groups and lurk in them long enough to log all the usernames or possibly even just take screenshots of chats in the specific group and you know what profile pictures they're using and what their display
names are at the time and then send those requests into telegram for more information on those users and and it's not just the public groups that you can search for on telegram that are going to be found out police and federal agents can just as easily get links to the private chats that conduct illegal activity and probably are conducting the majority of the illegal activity um because a lot of the time the people who are running these groups end up posting links to it all over Instagram and other social networks that criminals use to advertise
on yeah yesterday the telegram CEO also announced that the company was using a dedicated team of moderators now and AI tools to find and shut down public groups that were participating in illegal activity on the platform and I also don't see any technical reason why this moderation the people and the AI tool can't be applied to private groups on telegram other than there may be being too high of a volume of illegal activity for that team to address right now um because telegram should be aware of all of the private invite links to groups you
know all of these t.me links that you see uh as soon as they're created but maybe they just aren't policing that stuff right now because they aren't being pressured into it yet but see that's really where the problem lies with these centralized messaging apps that actually do store a lot of data about people and because they are centralized they actually do have the capability to be moderated and censored because for years telegram has largely been relying on the trust me bro security model I mean it is open source at the very least and to be
fair they have resisted cooperating with authorities for a long time they even left Russia because of that because they didn't want to give that government access to encryption keys and they've refused censorship requests coming from Iran and a couple other different countries but clearly the French government has managed to twist their arm into compliance with fighting drugs CP and all other kinds of online crime that have flourished on telegram over the years and from a technical standpoint telegram could be forced to send censor any kind of group that's about any topic I wouldn't be surprised
if the hacker groups are next I mean they didn't really specifically mention that in their terms of service I guess it depends on how you interpret it but that's clearly illegal activity or at least it links to websites that are participating in illegal activity uh and now that they're using AI to analyze the whole platform for illegal content the removal of of anything could be automated as long as the AI can be adapted to detecting different kinds of content so it'll be interesting to see how telegram does moving forward because other than I guess Facebook
messenger and WhatsApp telegram is the most popular encrypted messaging app in like pretty much any app store um so yeah it's going to be interesting to see if other apps like signal end up getting a boost in users now or the even more advanced apps like simple x chat or Matrix that are decentralized uh and pretty much impossible to compel any type of moderation or censorship in like we're seeing with telegram now let me know your thoughts about this in the comments below like and share this video to hack the algorithm and have a great
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