'Your Nudes Are Safe With Us': Telegram CEO Hits Back In WhatsApp Privacy Row — But Is It True?

Telegram's billionaire founder and CEO Pavel Durov took potshots at WhatsApp, stating in a Sunday X post that WhatsApp's 'E2E encryption of default' claim is a 'giant consumer fraud.' He argued that 95% of private WhatsApp messages end up in 'plain-text backups' on Apple or Google servers and are not end-to-end (E2E)-encrypted.

When an X user said: 'I usually send my nudes over Telegram, not WhatsApp,' Durov responded by thanking the person for his trust and remarked, 'The nudes are safe with us.'

Durov's comment triggered a row, linking to a BBC investigation in 2022 that revealed people share women's intimate pictures on Telegram without their consent. Sensitive content was shared to harass and even blackmail many victims on a considerable scale across countries, with personal details like home addresses and parents' phone numbers posted alongside explicit pictures.

According to BBC, which monitored 18 Telegram channels and two dozen groups in multiple countries, including Brazil, Russia, and Malaysia, group administrators were urging members to send intimate images of ex-partners or colleagues to an automated account for online publishing without revealing the identity of the real sender.

BBC had reported back then that Telegram does not have a special policy to combat the non-consensual sharing of intimate images. However, its terms of service make users agree 'not to post illegal pornographic content on publicly viewable Telegram channels, bots, etc.'

Telegram also attracts users seeking a less regulated space. 'According to Telegram and its owner, they don't want to censor users,' Access Now's tech legal counsel Natalia Krapiva told the BBC, which found that the 'light-touch approach to moderation' is making Telegram a haven for the sharing of intimate images.

Telegram has over 1 billion monthly active users currently, with many attracted by its privacy appeal. BBC had reported 100 images via the in-app reporting feature, but most remained accessible after a month. The media outlet had concluded that there was little evidence that the platform was striving to tackle this serious problem.

Can You Secure Your Data on Telegram?

Telegram's 'secret chat' option is the only way to ensure end-to-end encryption for its users. While end-to-end encryption is the default setting on apps like Signal, Telegram does not use E2E encryption by default for messaging.

An X user shared that regular chats, groups, and channels use Telegram's cloud chat model with client-server encryption. The app retains server-side access to content and media, meaning that Telegram can access your ordinary chat content!

Only when you turn on 'Secret Chats' are your messages safe, but this feature is device-specific and limited to conversations between two people. Although voice and video calls are also E2E encrypted, groups and channels do not have this option.

An AI forensics research report covered by AFP and WIRED found mostly non-consensual explicit content after analysis of 2.8 million messages from over 24,000 members and 82,000 media files across 16 Telegram communities in Spain and Italy.

Overall, reports indicated that Telegram's design appears to facilitate the rapid distribution and persistence of these networks while ordinary chats remain accessible to Telegram itself.