Telegram says it will share phone numbers and IPs of 'bad actors' to authorities | Hacker News Reader

Telegram says it will share phone numbers and IPs of 'bad actors' to authorities

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55 pointsr72119 comments

> If Telegram receives a valid order from the relevant judicial authorities

CEO's of tech companies won't go to jail to protect customers. Nothing new here (and despite claims to the contrary, Telegram already did this).

This is a weird way to look at the situation, because it doesn't even matter what the CEO of a tech company is willing to do or not do. No tech company is holding a state the size of France off by sheer force; they're just loitering on the shady site of an attention/irritation curve. At some point, you piss an industrial state off enough, they're going to win, for any definition of "win" involving "getting whatever data you have easy plaintext access to".

Telegram was unblocked by Putin's government after it agreed to "help with extremism investigations". Am I expected to assume that such agreement didn't include details such as IPs and phone numbers?

[1] https://www.independent.co.uk/tech/telegram-russia-ban-lift-...

It might be an unpopular opinion but I am in principle OK. However, it would be really great if telegram would automatically report any of such requests after an embargo period of e.g. even 6 month to the subject of the request. Further they should always require a court order, which should be straight forward in most countries. The worst thing about government actors is their intransparency. Even in Germany we had Nazi police officers requesting personal addresses of human rights attorneys. All this only gets noticed pretty much by chance.

what is the next step? Not allowing the sale of cars without remote shutdown switch? something else?

Why treat Telegram different than any other entity if they have a warrant for one of their clients/customers?

It's way better than the US CloudAct that doesn't differ.

The next step for telegram is pretty obvious. Stop collecting information about your users if you don't want to be forced to hand it over when given a valid government warrant. Of course that means they actually have to roll out E2E encryption by default so they probably won't do that.

Governments will just force user tracking and collecting data, and if you won't comply, you'll go to jail. If you're a legal business, there's no way to avoid three letter agencies messing with you and your users.

Or requiring a license to make toast in your own damn toaster?

Even worse! Forcing you to wear seat belts and drunk driving, which is just the purest form of communism

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2xcQIoh3FQQ

Whoah, I didn't know there was a prequel video!

What a German thing to say. How is this different from "I don't have anything to hide"?

The difference is they don't hand over the data of all their users but of specific ones, just like every other entity does if you have a warrant for that user.

You get warrants in Germany for nothing, that is not an excuse. Call an official a penis and the next judge will steal all your digital equipment.

You arguing about the when, I'm talking about the if.

That many warrant aren't worth the paper they are written on is a different issue.

The issue becomes far more pronounced if the state is able to determine your identity through your phone number, which in Germany is usually tightly coupled to your identity.

I don't need 3rd rate officials being in a position to judge my communication for some badly defined security benefit that allegedly would manifest for the whole society.

Plus Germany still has quite a bad record here. After WWII it didn't stop to invent new forms of totalitarianism through surveillance.

The German state is not ready to have that power.

Because the criticism of the "I don't have anything to hide" mentality is meant to support requiring warrants, due process and all that

It's not an argument the abolition of all criminal investigations in which a police officer is not a direct witness

Requiring a warrant is no sensible protection in Germany specifically and the saying certainly would include the situation in Germany.

I don't think government access to such accounts is particularly constructive. Be that as it may, there is a simple form of protection and that is not storing any phone numbers, which gladly most online services still don't do.

I cringe if some services ask me for a number for "security". Whose security would that be exactly? Certainly not mine, this is exposing unnecessary data.

This is why Signal or Telegram are no secure options for me because they simply are not secure. And this isn't some exotic security scenario, it is the exact issue many people already complained about for years.

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