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Telegram CEO charged in France for ‘allowing criminal activity’ on messaging app
(www.theguardian.com)
this post was submitted on 28 Aug 2024
236 points (98.0% liked)
Privacy
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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.
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.
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.
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.
I mean the basic logic of the service was designed somewhere before its release. Data policies, promises to users are nothing if you assume services should adapt to stuff like this, at the expense of breaking those policies and promises.
Here is an old article from telegram about reasons for how it works https://telegra.ph/Why-Isnt-Telegram-End-to-End-Encrypted-by-Default-08-14
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.