Pavel Durov, the founder and CEO of Telegram, has broken his silence after recently being arrested by French authorities. In a detailed post on his Telegram channel, Durov shared his experience and expressed his concerns over the way the situation was handled, calling it a “misguided approach.”
Durov revealed that he was interviewed by the police for four days in Paris. The reason? He was held responsible for illegal activities that some users were conducting on Telegram. According to French authorities, they had not received the necessary responses from the platform regarding these matters. However, Durov was taken aback by these claims and pointed out several issues.
Also read: Now arrested Telegram CEO Pavel Durov never got married but still has over 100 biological children
“Telegram has an official representative in the EU that accepts and replies to EU requests. Its email address has been publicly available for anyone in the EU who googles ‘Telegram EU address for law enforcement,'” Durov explained in his post. He added that the French authorities had multiple ways to reach him, noting his status as a French citizen and his previous cooperation with France on matters of national security.
Durov believes that holding him personally responsible for the misuse of Telegram by others is not the right solution. He emphasised that “established practice” is to take legal action against the service itself rather than targeting individual CEOs. “Building technology is hard enough as it is. No innovator will ever build new tools if they know they can be personally held responsible for potential abuse of those tools,” he said.
He also mentioned the challenge of balancing privacy and security, stating that it’s a complicated task. Telegram, according to Durov, has always aimed to protect user privacy while engaging in with regulators to meet law enforcement needs. However, when a country’s regulations clash with their core principles, Durov is ready to pull the plug, just as they did in Russia and Iran.
Despite these challenges, Durov acknowledged that Telegram needs to improve. He admitted, “Even the fact that authorities could be confused by where to send requests is something that we should improve.”
Durov ended on a hopeful note, expressing his commitment to making the platform safer as Telegram continues to grow. “I hope that the events of August will result in making Telegram — and the social networking industry as a whole — safer and stronger.”