After the founder was arrested, Telegram began sharing information about thousands of users with the police

Since changing its policies in response to the arrest of its founder last year, messaging app Telegram has dramatically increased its cooperation with law enforcement agencies around the world, sharing details about thousands more users than it did before.

In the United States, Telegram provided police with 108 user IP addresses or phone numbers in connection with 14 cases during the first nine months of 2024, according to the company’s quarterly transparency reports. In the last quarter of the year, Telegram provided US agencies with the IP addresses or phone numbers of 2,145 users as a result of 900 law enforcement requests.

In August, French authorities arrested W Charged Telegram founder Pavel Durov with enabling drug trafficking and child abuse on the platform. By the end of September, Durov Announce The company will begin sharing more information in response to legal requests from law enforcement agencies.

Transparency report data for 2024 Collected by Telegram users In more than a dozen countries, it shows that the company has followed through on this promise.

During the first half of the year, Telegram shared identifying information on only 54 users with French authorities. Between July and the end of September, this number jumped to 632 users (Durov was arrested on August 24). In the last three months of the year, Telegram provided French authorities with information about 1,386 users.

In the UK, more than 98 percent of law enforcement requests for user information to which Telegram responded came in the fourth quarter. In Finland, it was 79 percent, and in Belgium, it was 74 percent.

Among the countries included in the crowdsourced Telegram transparency dataset examined by Gizmodo, India saw the most cooperation between Telegram and law enforcement. Over the course of 2024, the company provided IP addresses or phone numbers to 23,535 users in response to 14,641 requests from Indian authorities.

More than half of those requests—7,649—It came in the fourth quarter. But unlike other countries, where Telegram responded to few, if any, legal demands for user data from January to September, data from India shows the company was responding to thousands of requests every quarter even before the policy change.

Durov’s arrest in France came after years of law enforcement agencies growing angry that the company was not helping investigations in the same way they had expected from social media and other messaging platforms.

Telegram, which allowed the creation of large, though unencrypted, mass messages to be more private than other social media, became popular for a variety of illicit activities.

When Durov announced that Telegram would begin sharing more information with law enforcement, in addition to changes to the platform’s search function, he said, “These measures should discourage criminals… We will not allow bad actors to jeopardize the safety of our platform for nearly a billion people.” “. users.”