I can only once again quote this section of Telegram's privacy policy verbatim:
> 8.3. Law Enforcement Authorities
> 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. When it does, we will include it in a semiannual transparency report published at: https://t.me/transparency.
And interacting with their "Transparency Report" bot yields this:
> [...] Note: for a court decision to be relevant, it must come from a country with a high enough democracy index to be considered a democracy. Only the IP address and the phone number may be shared.
In other words, they are cherry-picking the jurisdictions they are even choosing to recognize, and within those they are again cherry-picking "terror suspicions" as the only class of law enforcement requests they will honor.
If I were the CEO of a company maintaining such a position, I'd be a bit more careful on where to refuel my jet.
This seems to be a blatant lie. In russia telegram is wdidely used to prosecute people and crack down on descent. KGB (today know as FSB) seem to have free access to anything not encrypted on the platform.
I have no reason to doubt that, and evidence supports that statement (i.e. the fact that it got unblocked in Russia, after previously having been blocked).
They could in any case very well be selectively applying that policy. But if they were fully cooperating with French authorities, why would there be a warrant?
Why would KGB would share their toys with western powers? They have their ring of dictatorships to use it as one of most potent propaganda and tracking tools.
> 8.3. Law Enforcement Authorities
> 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. When it does, we will include it in a semiannual transparency report published at: https://t.me/transparency.
(from https://telegram.org/privacy)
And interacting with their "Transparency Report" bot yields this:
> [...] Note: for a court decision to be relevant, it must come from a country with a high enough democracy index to be considered a democracy. Only the IP address and the phone number may be shared.
In other words, they are cherry-picking the jurisdictions they are even choosing to recognize, and within those they are again cherry-picking "terror suspicions" as the only class of law enforcement requests they will honor.
If I were the CEO of a company maintaining such a position, I'd be a bit more careful on where to refuel my jet.