Criminal charges against Telegram CEO Pavel Durov have raised concerns among Silicon Valley companies about the end-to-end encryption of messages in apps, as well as privacy and security aspects.
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French prosecutors this week filed a slew of criminal charges against Pavel Durov, but one in particular has caught the attention of Silicon Valley companies. Telegram, French authorities said, provided encryption services without a license, a statement that raised eyebrows among U.S. technology companies including Signal, Apple and Meta✴ (which owns WhatsApp). They all offer end-to-end message encryption services and often act together when authorities in different countries challenge the legality of using this technology – it ensures the confidentiality of correspondence and protects it from interception attempts.
Telegram is positioned as an encrypted messaging app, but it does this differently than WhatsApp, Signal and iMessage. And if the prosecution presents it as a public example of a technology condemned by the authorities, then competitors will put themselves in a difficult position if they support the position of the authorities. In WhatsApp, Signal and iMessage, end-to-end encryption is enabled by default, which means that only the participants in the conversation have access to messages – the administrations of all these messengers assure that they themselves cannot read it. In Telegram, however, end-to-end encryption is enabled only in “secret chats”, which work only in the format of personal correspondence. In practice, the messenger is used by many to a greater extent for reading channels and communicating in multi-user chats, which are not protected by end-to-end encryption.
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Security experts continue to discuss the quality of encryption in Telegram. According to competing platforms, the messenger did not provide sufficient transparency because it did not publish encryption algorithms on the platform – they believe that Pavel Durov played on the public’s misunderstanding of encryption mechanisms and thereby strengthened the platform’s image as a safe place for communication. In May, he called the “secret chats” feature “the only popular way to communicate that is verifiably private.”
Apple, WhatsApp and Signal regularly appear in court and argue with governments, defending the right to use encryption features. Last year, the UK tried to ban encryption in messaging apps, and in response, WhatsApp and Signal threatened to leave the country. And Apple in 2020 refused to hack its own encryption mechanisms at the request of the FBI in order to open access to data on two iPhones belonging to the criminal.
The European Union is currently debating a new bill that would require messaging services to scan photos and links before sending them, a measure aimed at identifying child abuse material that has raised alarm among advocates of encryption mechanisms. Silicon Valley executives are closely monitoring Durov’s case to see what next steps French authorities are willing to take regarding encryption as they try to determine whether the feature requires a license in the country.
His case has also sparked debate over whether Telegram’s less stringent encryption standards were the reason for prosecution. Inappropriate content often ends up in the public domain on the platform, while content in WhatsApp and Signal conversations is only accessible to the sender and recipient. But Telegram’s competitors can still defend privacy in correspondence in general and the messenger in particular.