Pavel Durov, the creator of the social network Telegram, made a high-profile statement denouncing the unfettered "extraction of private information" from messengers like WhatsApp

The creator of Telegram said that according to a recent report, Telegram sticks to its promise to keep its users' data private, while claiming that apps like WhatsApp transmit their users' personal data in real-time to third parties and, despite its many claims of "E2E encryption," may also disclose the content of messages.

The report mentioned by Durov confirmed that Telegram remains one of the few messaging apps that does not violate its users' trust.

The entrepreneur also expressed indignation over the fact that other apps do not have free will in terms of guaranteeing the privacy of their users' personal data. In his opinion, engineers, working on the messengers "they have to secretly implement backdoors in their apps when the US government orders them to", and the public disclosure of this fact could lead to the arrest of the employee, who decided to take such a step due to breaching a gag order.

Anticipating the possibility of parrying his statement with the fact that a court order is required to access personal data, Durov noted, "agencies don't even need a court order to extract private information from messaging apps such as WhatsApp, and in other cases, court documents are shrouded in secrecy. Some supposedly secure apps have been funded by government agencies from their inception (e.g Anom, Signal)."

Another argument against the "security" of most social networks appealed to the National Security Agency (NSA), which according to Durov "has been making sure that international encryption standards are in line with what the NSA can decipher, and all other approaches to encryption are labeled as "non-standard" or "home-brew". Through their proxies in the encryption industry (like this one), the NSA imposed flawed standards onto the encryption used by the rest of the world, cautioning everyone else from "rolling out their own encryption".

WhatsApp and other U.S. apps "are plagued with backdoors – intentionally planted security loopholes that governments (and anybody else) can use to hack smartphones and extract private data from people." the billionaire added.

In his statement, Pavel mentioned the problems of his U.S. competitors. In his opinion, there is no way they can compete with Telegram in terms of growth rates, despite investing heavily in marketing (something Telegram has never had to invest in).