Pavel Durov denied the myth of the “Russian” Telegram and criticized WhatsApp

Pavel Durov, who is behind the popular Telegram messenger and one of the founders of VKontakte, burst into a long message on his Telegram channel. In it, Durov shared the success of Telegram, refuted several “myths” about Telegram and criticized Facebook with WhatsApp.

Protests against blocking Telegram in Russia

According to Durov, about 500 million people around the world use the Telegram messenger and this figure continues to grow.

He noted that there is a whole division in Facebook, the purpose of which was to find out the reasons for the popularity of Telegram:

Imagine, dozens of employees are working on just that task on an ongoing basis. ”

As a result, Durov decided to “save Facebook tens of millions of dollars and give out his secret for free.” According to Durov, the secret is simple: “Respect your users.”

Telegram founder criticized Facebook with WhatsApp for the latest changes to its privacy policy and terms of service. They imply the mandatory transfer of WhatsApp user data to the Facebook advertising network, if the user does not agree, then in February he will lose access to WhatsApp:

Not surprisingly, the flight of users from WhatsApp to Telegram, which has been going on for several years, has accelerated. “

Durov also decided to refute three main myths about Telegram, which are spread by bots behind which Facebook stands:

1. Telegram source code is not open source. In fact, all Telegram clients have been open source since 2013. Telegram is also the only messenger in the world that has verifiable builds for iOS and Android. As for WhatsApp, the developers there deliberately obfuscate the code, making it impossible to check encryption and privacy.
2. Telegram – Russian. In fact, Telegram has no servers or offices in Russia. Moreover, it is blocked in Russia from 2018 to 2020. Telegram is still blocked in Iran and several other authoritarian countries, while WhatsApp and other “supposedly safe” apps have never had such problems in these regions.
3. Telegram is not encrypted. Every Telegram chat has been encrypted since launch. Also, the messenger has “secret chats”, which use end-to-end encryption, and secure cloud storage. WhatsApp didn’t have any encryption for years and then started using a US government-funded encryption protocol with numerous backdoors and dependency on backups.

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