Telegram founder says WhatsApp reads users’ messages and shares them with third parties
Telegram founder Pavel Durov has again attacked Meta’s WhatsApp, writing in his Telegram channel that WhatsApp’s “encryption” is possibly the biggest fraud in history, misleading billions of users.
Durov said the Meta-owned messenger reads users’ messages and shares them with third parties. Telegram, he said, has never done this and never will.
He accompanied the post with a screenshot of a publication about a lawsuit against Meta accusing the company of storing and accessing private messages.
Durov has consistently criticized WhatsApp, the Russian business news outlet RBC notes. In January 2026, he said that believing in the messenger’s security would require being completely stupid, and in 2022 he said WhatsApp was a surveillance tool.
Both Telegram and WhatsApp are among the most popular messaging apps in Russia and worldwide. In Russia, both have faced restrictions — first calls were blocked within the apps, and then access to the apps themselves was curtailed.
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