Pavel Durov

Russia banned Telegram on its territory in April because we refused to provide decryption keys for all our users' communications to Russia's security agencies.

Russia banned Telegram on its territory in April because we refused to provide decryption keys for all our users' communications to Russia's security agencies. We believe we did the only possible thing, preserving the right of our users to privacy in a troubled country, as a result, we've also been unable to fully comply with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) for our EU-users by the deadline of May 25, 2018. We are continuing our efforts to resolve the situation.

In America they started to refer to Telegram as' ISIS's preferred messaging app,' but in reality there are many more legitimate users.

You can not make it safe against criminals and open for governments. It's either secure or not secure, if such a measure is implemented, most of our correspondence, our business secrets, our private data would be put at risk. Because if there's a back door, not only a government official could use it, but theoretically criminals including terrorists [ could too ].

I don't think so, they were probably using other messaging services as well. It's misleading to say that we were responsible -- or any tech company is responsible -- for that.

Whenever technological advancement is made it can always be used both for good or for bad, you can compare it with the invention of gunpowder for example : Once the secret is out there, it doesn't make sense to force your local users of gunpowder to make your gunpowder less efficient when the other side can still use it and use it in an efficient way.

This is a big debate concerning the values of the society in question : Whether the risk of a terrorist act is more important than the 100 % right to privacy, this should be decided by the people of the country in question. Not by Pavel Durov.

For two and a half years of our existence we haven't disclosed a... by Pavel Durov

For two and a half years of our existence we haven't disclosed a single bite of data of our users.

When I was living in Russia a few years ago, all these activities were used as a pretext to monitor the communication of Russian citizens and then in many cases used to suppress dissidents and liberal thinking individuals.

This set of values does not necessarily prevent us from earning money, i believe that at some point we should come up with a business model that would make us sustainable.

We had a simple choice: Either betray our values or keep our values and leave Russia to try to do something new.

We are not willing to compromise our values in order to increase... by Pavel Durov

We are not willing to compromise our values in order to increase our market share.

What I saw in countries like Russia [and] many other places is that when law enforcement bodies get access or can get access to the data eventually it leads to abusing that kind of power.