Telegram’s FAQ page says it does not process requests related to illegal content in chats and group chats, and that “to this day, we have disclosed 0 bytes of user messages to third parties, including governments”. Telegram’s default chat function missed points because the communications were not encrypted with keys the provider did not have access to, users could not verify contacts’ identities, and past messages were not secure if the encryption keys were stolen. The order came following a complaint from media organizations —Mediaset, Atresmedia and Movistar Plus+— saying the app allowed users to share copyrighted content without their consent.
It is estimated that the bot contains data from 26 million Ukrainians registered in the Diia application. Volodymyr Flents, the chairman of the public organization “Electronic Democracy”, announced on 11 May 2020 that a Telegram bot appeared on the Web, which sold the personal data of Ukrainian citizens. The group was banned after reports from users and media, although no public statement was made. The company has a verified channel called “Stop Child Abuse”, where daily statistics on the number of groups and channels banned for sharing illegal materials are posted. Twelve days later, Telegram told its users that the Brazilian Congressional Bill No. 2630 against online disinformation, which was about to be approved, would end freedom of speech in the country. Throughout 2020, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps used groups and channels to dox Iraqi and Iranian citizens, while sharing propagandistic posts on the platform.
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When typing in an emoji, the user is offered to send the respective sticker instead. The gateway is integrated with a bot, which is linked with the developer’s specific website domain. The gateway sends the user’s Telegram name, username, and profile picture to the website owner, while the user’s phone number remains hidden. Bots power Telegram’s gaming platform, which utilizes HTML5, so games are loaded on-demand as needed, like ordinary webpages.
Russian use for destabilization activities
The editorial staff was made aware of the advertisement by a Telegram user and the online magazine Übermedien. This is seen as an issue for non-profit organizations and similar entities who want to operate a Telegram channel. As of August 2025, there was no option for channel owners to opt out of this mechanism. The revenue of these advertisements is shared with the channel owner in form of Telegram’s Toncoin crypto currency. Under the EU’s Digital Services Act (DSA), Telegram was supposed to provide an updated number in August but failed to do so, only declaring it had “significantly fewer than 45mn average monthly active recipients in the EU”. The criminal activity of 25 people was confirmed and copies of 30 databases were seized.
- The company only partially fulfilled a court request for personal data on two antisemitic Telegram groups, which authorities considered an intentional lack of cooperation.
- When typing in an emoji, the user is offered to send the respective sticker instead.
- The gateway sends users’ Telegram name, username, and profile picture to the website owner, while users’ phone number remains hidden.
- The company has a verified channel called “Stop Child Abuse”, where daily statistics on the number of groups and channels banned for sharing illegal materials are posted.
- Nevertheless, they said they saw “no reason why Telegram should use a less secure encryption scheme when more secure (and at least as efficient) solutions exist”.
Users can schedule messages to send at a particular time or when their conversation partner comes online, as well as choose to send a message “without sound” without a notification. Some stickers feature full-screen effects that play out when first sent or when tapped. By default, any account that is inactive for 6 months is automatically deleted, though the period can be shortened or extended up to 18 months through the Settings menu. In October 2014, South Korean government surveillance plans drove many of its citizens to switch to Telegram from the Korean app KakaoTalk. Users can use Telegram’s transparency bot to check how many legal requests from their country it has processed.
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They also found that attackers had the theoretical ability to reorder messages coming from the client to the server though the attacker would not be able to see the content of the messages. It took 11 days for the database to be taken down, but the researchers say the data was accessed by other parties, including a hacker who reported the information to a specialized forum. In March 2014, Telegram promised that “all code will be released eventually”, including all the various client applications (Android, iOS, desktop, etc.) and the server-side code. In 2018, Telegram sent a message to all Iranian users stating that the Telegram Talai and Hotgram unofficial clients are not secure. In June 2017, Pavel Durov in an interview said that U.S. intelligence agencies tried to bribe the company’s developers to weaken Telegram’s encryption or install a backdoor during their visit to the U.S. in 2016. Pavel Durov has said that Telegram users in “troubled countries” should enable two-factor authentication by creating passwords in order to prevent this.
- It took 11 days for the database to be taken down, but the researchers say the data was accessed by other parties, including a hacker who reported the information to a specialized forum.
- Groups are large multi-user chats that support up to 200,000 members and can be public or private.
- Telegram’s internal reporting system has an option to report content that contains child abuse, including specific messages in groups and channels.
- For example, an article titled “Telegraph (blog platform)” published on 17 November would receive the URL /Telegraph-blog-platform-11-17.
- The company agreed to pay an $18.5 million penalty and return $1.22 billion to Gram purchasers.
- Andriy Kovalenko, head of the security council’s centre on countering disinformation, clarified that the ban was limited to official devices and did not extend to personal phones.
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The Telegram team responded that the flaw does not affect message security and that “a future patch would address the concern”. Nevertheless, they said they saw “no reason why Telegram should use a less secure encryption scheme when more secure (and at least as efficient) solutions exist”. In December 2015, two researchers from Aarhus University published a report in which they demonstrated that MTProto 1.0 did not achieve indistinguishability under chosen-ciphertext attack (IND-CCA) or authenticated encryption. The EFF said that the results “should not be read as endorsements of individual tools or guarantees of their security”, and that they were merely indications that the projects were “on the right track”.
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Specific users can be tagged in the group by adding @username to a message, where “username” is that particular user’s username. Ownership of channels and groups can be transferred to one of the admins if the owner wishes to give up their rights. They support flexible admin rights and can use bots for moderation to prevent spam and unwanted activity. Secret Chats restrict screenshotting from Android devices and warn when one is taken from an iOS device, while also hiding the chat contents from the final image.
Examples of platforms providing Telegram bot integration include respond.io, Manychat and Trengo. In June 2015, Telegram launched a platform for third-party developers to create bots. The interface shows users a visual representation of their storage usage and also lets them sort their cached media by size to clear specific items.
It received points for having communications encrypted in transit, having its code open to independent review, having the security design properly documented, and having completed a recent independent security audit. Telegram’s default chat function received a score of 4 out of 7 points on the scorecard. It noted that while the message data is encrypted on the device, it could not analyze the transmission due to a lack of source code. On 26 February 2014, the German consumer organization Stiftung Warentest evaluated several data-protection aspects of Telegram, along with other popular instant-messaging clients. Telegram has defended the lack of ubiquitous end-to-end encryption by saying that online-backups that do not use client-side encryption are “the most secure solution currently possible”.
Similarly, groups and channels can have content protection enabled, which prevents screenshots, forwarding and downloading of media. Premium users have the ability to set any chat folder as the default screen in the app while regular users will always see the full chat list when first opening the app. Messages from private chats can be forwarded, with an option to hide the original sender’s identity or to hide captions from media messages. Reactions are always on in private chats and can be enabled by admins in groups and channels with the ability to allow or exclude specific reactions. Users have the option to delete messages and whole chats for both themself and other participants.
Telegram has been blocked temporarily or permanently by some governments including Iran, China, Brazil, and Pakistan. Regarding Telegram, the report cites its lack of end-to-end encryption by default, its Russian origins and third-party open source intelligence as major critical points. In September 2021, a Russian researcher published details about a bug with the self-destruct feature that allowed the user to recover deleted photos from their own device.
Group voice and video chats support picture-in-picture video, as well as sharing one’s screen, creating a recording of the call, noise suppression and selective muting. Telegram added group voice chats in December 2020 and group video chats in June 2021. Channels are one-way feeds where the channel owner or admins can post content while followers can only read, react and comment, if comments have been enabled. Groups and channels also support polls, which can be open or anonymous and can support multiple choices.
Telegram has various client apps, some developed by Telegram Messenger LLP and some by the community. The protocol was developed by Nikolai Durov and other developers at Telegram and, as of version 2.0, is based on 256-bit symmetric AES encryption, 2048-bit RSA encryption and Diffie–Hellman key exchange. In July 2018, Telegram introduced their online authorization and identity-management system, Telegram Passport, for platforms that require real-life identification. When an author adds links to YouTube, Vimeo, or Twitter, the service allows you to embed their content directly in the article. For example, an article titled “Telegraph (blog platform)” published on 17 November would receive the URL /Telegraph-blog-platform-11-17. Specific limited-edition gifts can be upgraded to a collectible version, unlocking a random appearance and other attributes.
Portions of this content are ©1998–2025 by individual mozilla.org contributors. See Troubleshoot extensions, themes and hardware acceleration issues to solve common Firefox problems for instructions. On 24 August 2024, Pavel Durov, who is both a French and UAE citizen, was arrested in France by French authorities.
Telegram also offers an API that allows developers to create bots, which are accounts controlled by programs. Telegram stated that it does not have access to the data, while the platform will share the information only with the authorized recipient. When an online service requires such identification documents and verification, it forwards the information to the platform with the user’s permission. It asks users to upload their own official documents such as passport, identity card, driver license, etc.
The desktop clients, excluding the macOS client, do not feature options for end-to-end encrypted messages. This partially addresses the concern about the lack of scrutiny while confirming the formal security of the protocol’s latest version. In December 2020, a study titled “Automated Symbolic Verification of Telegram’s MTProto 2.0” was published, confirming the security of the updated MTProto 2.0 and reviewing it while pointing out several theoretical vulnerabilities. Criticisms were also aimed at Telegram’s use of a custom-designed encryption protocol.
Telegram made substantial efforts to ban illegal content such as child abuse and pro-terrorist channels, including a partnership with Europol to eliminate IS presence on the platform, but communities of far-right extremist users are still on the app. In the same year, Telegram reportedly banned more than 350,000 bots and channels, including those that contained child abuse and terrorism-related content. Users can however import chat history, including both messages and media, from WhatsApp, Line, and KakaoTalk due to data portability, either making a new chat to hold the messages or adding them to an existing one. Telegram allows groups, bots and channels with a verified social media or Wikipedia page to be verified, but not individual user accounts.
Chats can be exported to preserve them via Telegram’s Desktop client, although the saved data cannot be imported back into the user’s account. Upon signing up, messages sent and received by the user are tied to their number and a custom username, not the device. To use Telegram, a user must sign up with their phone number or an anonymous +888 number purchased from the Fragment blockchain platform. Telegram then gained over 70 million new users as a result of an outage which affected Facebook and its affiliates on 5 October 2021. Telegram (also known as Telegram Messenger) is a cloud-based, cross-platform social media and instant messaging (IM) service. Dark theme isn’t available for all apps.