Telegram Founder Pavel Durov: Privacy is Not for Sale

Earlier today we broke the news that the Russian court has blocked access to the popular private messaging app Telegram. As the country’s authorities are preparing to enact the ban, the founder, and CEO of the company, Pavel Durov took the opportunity to share his opinion with the public via his own channel on the app.

“The power that local governments have over IT corporations is based on money. At any given moment, a government can crash their stocks by threatening to block revenue streams from its markets and thus force these companies to do strange things (remember how last year Apple moved iCloud servers to China),” Durov said.

Highlighting that the firm is not in any way dependent on the actions taken by the Russian government, Durov elaborated: “At Telegram, we have the luxury of not caring about revenue streams or ad sales. Privacy is not for sale, and human rights should not be compromised out of fear or greed.”

He proceeded to share with Russian media that Telegram will use standard methods which are incorporated into the app to secure adequate connections for the users of the messaging app. Durov stressed that users will not need to make any settings changes.

That said, Durov did not guarantee that the service will be 100 percent available even if used via a VPN or a proxy server. The founder of Telegram and Russian social media website VKontakte said that the service might get overloaded in the first hours after the enactment of the ban, leading to a possible slowdown of the software.

Durov was famously forced out of his own VKontakte social network as the Russian government cracked down on the firm. After he fled to the US, where he announced his work on Telegram, the founder, and CEO of the popular private messaging app has unveiled the largest ICO to date, aiming to raise $2 billion. Filings with the SEC show that the firm has already raised $1.7 billion from private investors.