explainers

Crowdsourcing Telegram ‘transparency reports’ to map the network’s claimed compliance with governments around the world

Source: Meduza

In early October, a month after Telegram founder Pavel Durov was arrested in Paris on charges related to the network’s alleged noncompliance with French state officials, researchers discovered an official bot that allows users to obtain “transparency reports” about the number of times Telegram fulfilled a local government’s requests for users’ IP addresses and/or phone numbers (and the number of affected users).

Because the bot only provides data for the country in which the account demanding data is registered, mapping Telegram’s data sharing around the world has proved difficult. Last week, Human Rights Watch technologist Etienne Maynier and researcher Celso Bessa launched a crowdsourced effort relying largely on the Mastodon community to combine Telegram’s reports into a single spreadsheet.

To check this database’s accuracy and build on its findings, Meduza asked its readers to share their own transparency reports from Telegram’s bot. We heard from more than a thousand of you! Thanks! (Meduza also drew on a Twitter survey by IT specialist Vladislav Zdolnikov.) Our list includes data from more than 80 countries (almost double the nations covered in the Maynier-Bessa chart), and the information you shared shows that Telegram claims not to have fulfilled any government data requests in many places.

Number of government requests for Telegram user data and number of users affected