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Since changing its policies in response to the arrest of its founder last year, messaging app Telegram has greatly increased its cooperation with law enforcement agencies around the world, sharing details about thousands of users more than 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 fourth quarter of the year, Telegram provided US agencies with IP addresses or phone numbers for 2,145 users stemming from 900 law enforcement requests.
In August, the French authorities arrested and in charge Telegram founder Pavel Durov enabled drug trafficking and child abuse on the platform. At the end of September Durov announced that the company is beginning to share 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 shows that the company has followed this promise.
During the first half of the year, Telegram shared identifying information about only 54 users with French authorities. Between July and the end of September, which jumped to 632 users (Durov was arrested on August 24). And in the last three months of the year, Telegram gave the French authorities information on 1,386 users.
In the UK, more than 98 percent of law enforcement requests for user information that Telegram answered 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 that Gizmodo examined, India saw the most cooperation between Telegram and law enforcement. In 2024, the company provided IP addresses or phone numbers for 23,535 users in response to 14,641 requests from Indian authorities.
More than half of these requests—7,649—came in the fourth quarter. But unlike other countries, where Telegram responded to few or no legal requests for user data from January to September, data from India shows that the company responds to thousands of requests each quarter as well before the policy changes.
Durov’s arrest in France came after years of law enforcement agencies becoming increasingly angry that the company was not assisting with investigations in the same way they expected from other networks social and messaging platforms.
Telegram, which allowed the creation of large group messages that, while not encrypted, were still more private than other social media sites, had become 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 deter criminals… We will not let bad actors jeopardize the integrity of our platform for nearly one billion users.”
