Durov doesn’t feel guilty about terrorists using his app

Sep 23, 2015 07:55 GMT  ·  By

Privacy-centric app Telegram has slowly started to become the go-to alternative for people looking to migrate from services like WhatsApp and Facebook. However, the app’s active user base remains quite small compared to other platforms, revolving around 60 million.

But this relatively humble user base is quite lively and chatty. In a recent interview with Telegram’s co-founder Pavel Durov, conducted by TechCrunch, he has revealed that 12 billion messages are being sent out daily via the platform. This constitutes an increase since August, when Telegram reported 10 billion messages being exchanged by the app’s users.

Durov has also explained why people are starting to move away from messaging applications like WhatsApp. In his opinion, two things undermine WhatsApp’s dominion: security and the cloud. Chats on the service are saved locally on your phone and don’t have cross device sync, which becomes very annoying if your phone's battery is dying out.

He also talked about the app’s privacy concern, pointing towards a recent incident in Russia involving one of his friends when messages sent via the application were intercepted and decrypted by the police. Apparently, law-enforcement used the messages in an attempt to blackmail the person in question.

Telegram believes in privacy, at all costs

By contrast, Telegram is far more secure and such a scenario would never happen for users using it. But what about the eventuality where police are actually hunting wrong doers and Telegram message decryption might offer the necessary clues?

Durov actually admitted during the aforementioned interview that ISIS (self-styled Islamic State) was using Telegram. But when asked if he slept well at night knowing that terrorists use the platform because they know it’s so safe, he gave quite a disquieting answer:

“That’s a very good question, but I think that privacy, ultimately, and our right for privacy is more important than our fear of bad things happening like terrorism.”

He went on to explain that ISIS members will probably always find a way to communicate with each other, Telegram or no Telegram. That’s why Durov doesn’t feel like his service is actually taking part in these activities and says he has nothing to feel guilty about.

He maintains that Telegram is doing the right thing in protecting users’ privacy, but should privacy be put above everything else in this world?

In the interview, Telegram’s co-founder also reveals that they are thinking about rolling out a payment API for third-party developers using a bot platform to authorize payments from users. No word on when we can expect this feature to be implemented yet.