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Telegram CEO charged in France for ‘allowing criminal activity’ on messaging app
(www.theguardian.com)
this post was submitted on 28 Aug 2024
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Privacy
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Yeah, I'm siding with the French government on this one at first blush. E2EE platforms are a necessary tool for combating government overreach and corporate surveillance. But if you willingly make a platform that's not E2EE, the idea of users being able to share this vile shit being a "necessary evil" toward the greater societal good completely falls apart. If you 1) have this vile content on your platform, 2) know it exists, 3) can trivially combat it in a targeted manner, and 4) choose not to, then you're complicit in its distribution.
I have no sympathy for a CEO who tries to dupe their userbase into believing their app is private and then not even take advantage of the one single ethical benefit to the platform not being E2EE.
That's a wild way of twisting the logic. Just because the platform doesn't fall under your e2ee definition doesn't mean they had to do something that is only possible on purely cloud services.
The reason for arrest doesn't even have anything to do with encryption. All content that facilitates mentioned crimes is public. Handling it shouldn't involve any backdoors or otherwise service-side decryption.
After reading the article and the links in the article, I'm not seeing anywhere where they stated the chats there requesting information on were public chats, did you have a source that discussed that I could read up on? It sounds fairly interesting to me.
No, just personal experience (I use telegram for many years) and absence of server data implications anywhere across the issues in the past (at this time too). You can find questionable or illegal businesses in telegram with a few words, they are all public channels. Hence "no moderation" accuses mentioned in every article.
There are of course darknet-like private communities, but I assume they are not a subject of interest at this time. Authorities would need to dig very deep past all the obvious illegal stuff, and telegram shouldn't care about resources consumed by such a small chunk of user base. Those groups will stay, as they are, private and safe, I assume, for quite some time.