Dutch police can request telephone numbers of anonymous telegram users | Hacker News Reader

Dutch police can request telephone numbers of anonymous telegram users

tweakers.net

6 pointsGys5 comments

Translated:

Dutch police can urgently request data of anonymous Telegram users by filling in a form and sending it in. Under the rules, this is actually only possible if there is immediate danger to life.

The form goes to a Telegram office in Dubai, after which personal data on the user is returned, BNR reports. The radio station has read this in documents the editors requested through the Open Government Act. The possibility has existed since December last year.

Telegram says nothing about requests from governments in its privacy policy, but says in its faq that it has given "0 bytes of data" to governments. "Telegram can only be forced to give up data if an issue is serious and universal enough to pass the test of different legal systems around the world."

The Dutch police are not the only ones who can do this. German federal police can also request data from Telegram, Heise writes. It is unclear how often Dutch police have already requested data from Telegram.

Thank you for the translation. The report is wrong about Telegram's privacy statement though. The current privacy statement at https://telegram.org/privacy says "If Telegram receives a court order that confirms you're a terror suspect, we may disclose your IP address and phone number to the relevant authorities." However, in the next sentence it also claims "So far, this has never happened", which is clearly wrong and has been since at least 2022 (see my remark on the situation in Germany above). It then goes on to say "When it does [happen], we will include it in a semiannual transparency report published at: https://t.me/transparency." Maybe someone using Telegram could check out whether they published at least the German cases there, since those happened over a year ago.

I can only seem to get the report for Germany. Here is the bot's reply (formatting omitted):

>No transparency report is available for your region. If any IP addresses or phone numbers are shared in accordance with 8.3 of the Privacy Policy[0], we will publish a transparency report within 6 months of it happening and will continue publishing semiannual reports.

>Note: for a court decision to be relevant, it must come from a country with a high enough democracy index[1] to be considered a democracy. Only the IP address and the phone number may be shared.

[0] https://telegram.org/privacy#8-3-law-enforcement-authorities

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democracy_Index

If I follow https://t.me/transparency it opens in the app and seems to only allow me to request a report for my own 'region'. Which report is empty.

I am not able to change that to another 'region', like 'Germany'. Why not? Seems very evasive.

Would be interesting to know the precise number of requests that Telegram replied to in the Netherlands. And also where else in the world this has already happened. I.e. according to NDR research, the German federal police BKA handed in 202 requests in 2022 and telegram answered 64 of them, handing over user data in 25 cases.

(Source: https://www.ndr.de/der_ndr/presse/mitteilungen/Ministerium-b...)

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