We don’t take people’s trust for Telegram for granted,” says Pavel Durov.ĭurov says there are currently about 100,000 daily active users and he hopes users and developers will take advantage of Telegram’s open API and protocol. “The first thing that we wanted to make clear is that nobody has to trust anybody. Telegram wants to earn users’ trust by operating as a non-profit, open platform initiative. One key difference between Telegram’s secret and ordinary chats is that secret chats are not stored in the app’s cloud, which means you can only access messages from their device of origin. They cannot be forwarded and can be set to self-destruct after a certain amount of time. The app’s secret chats, a separate feature from its ordinary chats, use end-to-end encryption. Telegram is based on a custom data protocol called MTProto built Nikolai Durov, a mathematician. (During our phone interview, Durov noted that he was using a Russian SIM card and that there was a good chance our conversation was being recorded by the Russian legal authorities.) Gaining Trust By Being Non-Profit And Open Though the organization later claimed the blacklisting was an accident, some analysts said it was a government attempt to intimidate online activists. VK was also put on a blacklist earlier this year by Russia’s State Telecom Regulator. An investigation into a traffic incident Durov denied involvement in was halted for the second time earlier this month, but not before the offices of VK and Durov’s home were both searched. We are certainly among many, many people who started to think about ways to fix the problem,” Pavel told me in a phone interview.ĭurov has had his own run-ins with Russian legal authorities.
“It made a lot of people really scared and concerned about the current situation. Created by the founders of Russia’s biggest social networking platform, Telegram is a new messaging app that offers speed, security and features such as secret chats with end-to-end encryption and self-destructing messages.īrothers Nikolai and Pavel Durov, who launched VK (originally called VKontakte) in 2006, began working on Telegram 18 months ago as a research project because they wanted to create something that was “really secure and fun at the same time.” The importance of Telegram was underscored when Edward Snowden’s revelations about NSA and PRISM were first made public in June.