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.

    • rdri@lemmy.world
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      3 months ago

      Wording is confusing. Here are some better takes that sound valid and are true:

      • Telegram’s e2ee is only available for chats of 2 people, and only on official mobile client.

      • Telegram’s e2ee is a feature you have to enable whenever you need it (called secret chats).

    • TheTechnician27@lemmy.world
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      3 months ago

      Yeah, I’m siding with the French government on this one at first blush. E2EE platforms are a necessary tool for combating government overreach and corporate surveillance. But if you willingly make a platform that’s not E2EE, the idea of users being able to share this vile shit being a “necessary evil” toward the greater societal good completely falls apart. If you 1) have this vile content on your platform, 2) know it exists, 3) can trivially combat it in a targeted manner, and 4) choose not to, then you’re complicit in its distribution.

      I have no sympathy for a CEO who tries to dupe their userbase into believing their app is private and then not even take advantage of the one single ethical benefit to the platform not being E2EE.

      • rdri@lemmy.world
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        3 months ago

        That’s a wild way of twisting the logic. Just because the platform doesn’t fall under your e2ee definition doesn’t mean they had to do something that is only possible on purely cloud services.

        The reason for arrest doesn’t even have anything to do with encryption. All content that facilitates mentioned crimes is public. Handling it shouldn’t involve any backdoors or otherwise service-side decryption.

        • Grey Cat@lemmy.world
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          3 months ago

          It is about encryption though. Since it’s possible for him to get access to anything said in those group chats, they asked him to provide all Telegram has on those users and chats. He didn’t, he got arrested.

          He wouldn’t have been in as much trouble if those chats were encrypted and Telegram couldn’t know anything about what’s said in what chat by which user.

          Because hw wouldn’t be “betraying” his users by giving everything that was asked of him by the authorities.

          • rdri@lemmy.world
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            3 months ago

            Assuming things should work that way is ignorant. According to you, service owners should design and redesign their services to not store any data in order to avoid arrests. Also that a service owner should invent stuff they might not had a plan for if they have even a theoretical possibility to help identify individual users, in other words go against policies they designed at some point.

            • Grey Cat@lemmy.world
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              3 months ago

              Assuming things should work that way is ignorant. According to you, service owners should design and redesign their services to not store any data in order to avoid arrests.

              If they don’t want to be arrested yes, they should either do that or have good enough moderation to not get in the bad graces of some big entities like countries.

              I’m not sure what you meant with the rest of your comment.

                • Grey Cat@lemmy.world
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                  3 months ago

                  The thing is I think he did think of stuff like this.
                  From what the article says and from what I knew. Telegram purposefuly made “distributed cross-jurisdictional encrypted cloud storage” to try and evade governments. So he did have them in mind.
                  If we lived in a world where we didn’t have to think about governments spying on us, we might have not even needed encryption to begin with.

                  But thank you for the link, it was an interesting read even if I don’t agree with what he’s trying to convey / prove.

        • Pika@sh.itjust.works
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          3 months ago

          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.

          • rdri@lemmy.world
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            3 months ago

            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.

  • taanegl@beehaw.org
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    3 months ago

    So to make it clear, it’s because their company actually holds some data for clients that these governments want access to - because telegram is not peer-to-peer, unless you set a chat to private.

    In essence Telegram as a company holds a lot of data that the French authorities want access to…

    This comment brought to you by the Signal gang.

    • istanbullu@lemmy.ml
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      3 months ago

      Nobody is coming after Signal because nobody uses Signal. Telegram has a user base of almost 1 billion.

      • taanegl@beehaw.org
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        3 months ago

        Yeah. A lot of people use Facebook and TikTok too, yet here we are on Lemmy. How many users are there here?

  • taanegl@beehaw.org
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    3 months ago

    You’re irrelevant IN the big picture, at least with that attitude. Defeatism is everywhere and prevents grassroots movements and is the sign of a weak spirit. I refuse that attitude and stick to the merits of a concept, rather than falling back on a logical fallacy like appeal to majority. Stop doing that, because that’s how you get subjugated, that’s how change is prevented, that is how those in power and influence remain in power and influence. Be the change you want to see.

    EDIT: but yes, i was lost, as i thought i was answering to a comment in my inbox, but I did also find @MeetInPotatoes@lemmy.ml mom - and boy did I meet those potatoes, lemme tell ya.