Telegram’s operators have handed over the personal data of its users to the German Federal Criminal Police Office (BKA), contradicting the company’s earlier assertions that such data would be kept private from governments.
According to Spiegel, the personal information belongs to people who were suspected of terrorist and child abuse charges. It is still difficult for German police to obtain data from Telegram in the case of other offenses.
The change appears to be a relaxation of the company’s attitude on personal information. For a long time, German investigators have never received a positive reaction from Telegram when they asked the firm to provide the identity of persons behind illicit content on the internet.
Telegram’s claim on its official website that “to this day, we have released 0 bytes of user data to third parties, including governments” is contradicted by the data transfer.
Cloud chat data, according to the firm, is stored in many data centers across the world, each of which is controlled by a different legal entity in a different jurisdiction.
Furthermore, decryption keys are broken down into many pieces and never kept in the same location as the information they are designed to safeguard.
As a result, Telegram will only be required to hand over data if many court orders from several jurisdictions arise.
“Thanks to this structure, we can ensure that no single government or block of like-minded countries can intrude on people’s privacy and freedom of expression,” the company claims.
However, Telegram’s recent German handover shatters this narrative, raising the risk that it would be required to disclose private data by other nations as well.
To read our blog on “Ban on Telegram in Brazil has been lifted,” click here.
