• Telegram has published a transparency report for the first part of the year.
• This as Telegram shifts its policy to be more compliant with requests for information.
• In the US, Telegram gave authorities information that could impact 108 users.

Back in August, while deplaning in France, Telegram chief executive officer, Pavel Durov was detained by authorities.

The exec was held over failures to police his platform where criminal organisations enjoy an unprecedented level of freedom compared to other chat applications. All tolled, Durov faced as many as 12 charges laid by French lawmakers.

Since that fateful occurrence, Telegram has embraced a policy shift and broadened its cooperation with authorities from terror threats to crime in general. Last week, Telegram updated its policy to reflect that, and now it has revealed how much it cooperates with authorities.

“If Telegram receives a valid order from the relevant judicial 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: https://t.me/transparency,” reads the relevant section of the policy.

We can’t seem to get the relevant report from the bot but 404 Media has. The publication reports that between January and September of this year, the chat platform complied with 14 requests for IP addresses and/or phone numbers in the US, affecting 108 users. That’s relatively small but it extends beyond the US.

“For example, in Brazil, we disclosed data for 75 legal requests in Q1 (January-March) 2024, 63 in Q2, and 65 in Q3. In India, our largest market, we satisfied 2461 legal requests in Q1, 2151 in Q2, and 2380 in Q3,” Durov said on his own Telegram channel on Wednesday.

“In Europe, there was an uptick in the number of valid legal requests we received in Q3. This increase was caused by the fact that more EU authorities started to use the correct communication line for their requests, the one mandated by the EU DSA law. Information about this contact point has been publicly available to anyone who viewed the Telegram website or googled ‘Telegram EU address for law enforcement’ since early 2024,” wrote Durov.

The CEO maintains that Telegram will only comply with law enforcement requests that don’t go against its values of freedom and privacy. But really, if authorities can show that a person is using freedom and privacy to commit crimes on the platform, Telegram will have to comply.

This is, however, true for most social platforms. You would struggle to find a modern platform that doesn’t comply with requests for information from authorities, at least not one that your friends and family could easily download.

Whether this change from Telegram will push criminals and other ne’er-do-wells to other platforms will be interesting to see but we suspect there will be an exodus, especially if Telegram is complying with authorities.