Following the arrest of its CEO last summer, Telegram has been increasingly sharing user data at the request of authorities, according to data collected by researchers.
French authorities arrested Telegram CEO Pavel Durov, a dual citizen of France and Russia, in August 2024 as part of an investigation into criminal activities facilitated by the privacy-focused messaging application. Durov was targeted by prosecutors over Telegram enabling organized crime and its refusal to cooperate with authorities.
Durov was released several days later and promised to make significant improvements in an effort to tackle the use of the platform for illicit activities, as well as to provide — in response to valid legal requests — the IP addresses and phone numbers of users who violate rules.
Telegram provides a bot that shares a very brief transparency report for each user’s respective country, revealing the number of law enforcement requests for IPs and/or phone numbers, as well as the number of affected users.
Two researchers, including one working with Human Rights Watch, recently launched a crowdsourced effort and have been sharing the collected data on a publicly available GitHub page.
The data shows a surge in the last quarter of 2024 compared to the previous quarters. While data is not available for many countries, in some countries authorities made hundreds of requests in an effort to obtain data on thousands of users.
The data shows that roughly 2,000 users have been targeted by authorities in the United States, Germany and France. A few hundred users were targeted in the United Kingdom, Spain, Belgium, and the Netherlands.
Telegram’s ‘Transparency Reports’ bot reveals that the company will publish an annual DSA transparency report for 2024 — DSA stands for the EU’s Digital Services Act, which aims to prevent illegal and harmful activities online — later this month.
Related: X Releases Its First Transparency Report Since Elon Musk’s Takeover
Related: Ukraine Bans Telegram Messenger App on State-Issued Devices Because of Russian Security Threat
Related: Telegram Zero-Day Enabled Malware Delivery
Related: After Microsoft and X, Hackers Launch DDoS Attack on Telegram
