Telegram’s CEO, Pavel Durov, has said Telegram would rather exit a market than “undermine encryption with backdoors,” reaffirming the company’s commitment to users’ privacy and security.
“Unlike some of our competitors, we don’t trade privacy for market share. In its 12-year history, Telegram has never disclosed a single byte of private messages,” wrote Durov in his public Telegram channel on April 21, 2025.
Thoughts? PR?
Yeah, wouldn’t or shouldn’t matter - it’s still an inferior product for what an IM needs to be from a privacy and security POV.
Good, any encrypted messenger should take this stance. Although Telegram only offers true E2EE for 1 on 1 secret chats, still good to see.
It’s marketing from Durov then. They don’t encrypt most private messages, despite saying :
“Unlike some of our competitors, we don’t trade privacy for market share. In its 12-year history, Telegram has never disclosed a single byte of private messages,” wrote Durov in his public Telegram channel on April 21, 2025.
I’m not sure if Telegram’s marketing would, in fact, be a net positive.
It could give people a false sense of security for Telegram’s encryption and chat moderation stance.
Backdoor or not. Intelligence companies are auto-scraping public telegram channels/groups where cybercriminals snitch on themselves 24/7. The messages can also be pulled with Cellebrite after Telegram hands over their IP and they close in on their location.
Telegram is not backdoored, it’s front-doored.
The clients do not support end-to-end encryption for groups. Those chats automatically leak to the server, which is exactly the same effect a backdoor in Signal would have.
The desktop clients do not support end-to-end encryption, which means 100% of desktop chats leak to the server, which is exactly the same effect a backdoor in Signal would have.
The 1:1 chats on telegram phone conversations by default leak all messages to Telegram server, which has the exact same effect a backdoor in Signal would have.
The 1:1 chats on Telegram can be end-to-end encrypted if the user enables secret chats. This leaks intent to hide from Telegram as a company.
The 1:1 end-to-end encrypted secret chats on Telegram can not be continued on desktop, which tires out the user, who eventually gives up, and reverts back to non-secret chats. This is an ingenious backdoor, because you can blame it on the user. It’s your fault for not protecting your messages. When you drop the use of E2EE secret chats, your messages leak to the server, which has the exact same effect a backdoor in Signal would have.
Telegram is open about all of this so it’s not backdoored. It’s front doored.
This serves another purpose: No security researcher can write a paper about a backdoor in Telegram’s encryption, because the fine-print already reveals all of this. It’s so obvious to experts, it’s like writing a physics paper about water being wet.
The last part of this front door is marketing. Telegram and its cult following have been misleading the users about Telegram being “heavily encrypted”, and they have misled the system to be E2EE by saying it has MTProto E2EE protocol, and that all chats use MTProto.
The fine print is, BOTH THE END-TO-END ENCRYPTION PROTOCOL, AND THE CLIENT-SERVER ENCRYPTION PROTOCOL ARE CALLED MTProto.