Pavel Durov’s detention by French authorities is a major break from the norm – but his low-moderation, non-encrypted app is an anomaly among its peers
French investigators had issued a warrant for Durov’s arrest as part of an inquiry into allegations of fraud, drug trafficking, organised crime, promotion of terrorism and cyberbullying. The Paris prosecutor, Laure Beccuau, said the investigation concerned crimes related to illicit transactions, child sexual abuse, fraud and the refusal to communicate information to authorities.
But even if a soft-touch moderation team might open a company up to fines under laws like the UK’s Online Safety Act and the EU’s Digital Services Act, it’s rare for it to lead to personal charges – and rarer still for those charges to result in an executive being remanded in custody.But there is one quirk about Telegram that means it’s in a somewhat different position to peers such as WhatsApp and Signal: the service is not end-to-end encrypted.
Telegram is different. The service does offer end-to-end encryption, through a little-used opt-in feature called “secret chats” but, by default, conversations are encrypted only insofar as they can’t be read by any random person connected to your wifi network. To Telegram itself, any messages sent outside a “secret chat” – which includes every group chat, and every message and comment on one of the service’s broadcast “channels” – is effectively in the clear.
At the same time, if a government comes knocking at Telegram’s door asking for information on a wrongdoer, real or perceived, Telegram doesn’t have the same safety that its peers do. An end-to-end encrypted service can sincerely tell law enforcement that it can’t help them. In the long run, that tends to create a fairly hostile atmosphere, but it also turns the conversation into a general one about principles of privacy versus policing.