Telegram is accused of working on the special services of the Russian Federation: what is dangerous and who should remove the messenger
The results of the survey of the sociological group "Rating" in February this year show that during the year of the full -scale war, Ukrainians began to receive news from channels from Telegram and Viber more often more often. If at the end of 2021 there were only 11% of such people, now 41% of Ukrainians read information in messengers.
Against the background of the frantic growth of Telegram influence on the population of the country, Minister of Culture and Information Policy Oleksandr Tkachenko called for regulation of the messenger in Ukraine. "Telegram has created a community closed from society at a time when all the media that fall under the law" On Media ", open, known owners, there is some reporting, etc. Therefore, Telegram is a question that requires a real expert expert Discussion, "the official commented.
Meanwhile, experts are concerned not only by the fact that Ukrainians can receive information from anonymous channels or read Russian propaganda media. The safety of transmission of information with the help of a messenger created by the famous Russian programmer and businessman Pavel Durov is also questioning.
The entrepreneur and founder of Petcube Yaroslav Azhnyuk in his column on "Ukrainian Truth" writes that Ukrainian society should consciously accept the risks of using Telegram and try to find him an alternative for everyday use. "No, I do not urge him to ban him immediately how it was (quite right) with Vkontakte. But it is time for us to start talking seriously about the risks of a telegram, especially established on telephones of civil servants and military," he said.
According to cybersecurity expert, 10Guards CEO Vitaliy Yakushev, the use of any public messenger-Viber, WhatsApp, Facebook, Signal or Telegram-cannot be considered completely safe. "All public messengers in the world are subject to the rules of the country where servers are located. And some countries require the installation of servers in their territory specifically to control these companies," he explains.
At least messengers can provide special services of countries where their servers, metadata (service information about other data. For example - at what time the message was sent, what kind of message was sent - text, audio file or video), at the maximum - the content of the messages themselves , the expert comments. Despite the fact that Telegram servers are not in Russia, it is in the work of Russian special services that Pavel Durov suspect.
As Azhnyuk writes, by 2020, Russia made several attempts to block the application of the application in the country, but three years ago Roskomnadzor unlocked Telegram, reporting that this was made possible by "agreement with its founder. Durov did not provide encryption keys to his resource, but agreed to "cooperate" in matters of terrorism and extremism. A little later, Russian President Vladimir Putin even cited an application as an example of constructive cooperation with the social network.
and correspondence of users to feesbushnik. assumptions and assumptions that are based on other facts from the biography of the programmer. However, it is impossible to completely eliminate the fact that the FSB freely uses the personal data and messages of Telegram users is also impossible, the expert agrees. Information to Russian special services may also be traveled.
For example, when we talk about the occupied territories of Ukraine, residents have repeatedly told reporters about how the security officers checked their messengers and found even the information that was deleted. Unfortunately, there are programs for this, and to protect them it is not easy to "clean up" the message - you also need to involve special applications, and not everyone knows how to do it.
Because of such restored chats in the same Telegram, the Russians receive information about other people who were notified. It also creates sometimes a misconception that the Russian Federation has full access to all correspondence in the application. Yakushev is convinced that Ukrainians can continue using the application, but this does not exactly apply to military or people who convey important information that may be interesting to the enemy.
In this case, the expert advises not to trust any of the public messengers, but to stop only on fully protected data channels. It is also necessary to be careful to the occupied territories and not to forget that even removed chats can be restored when delaying a person and physical access to his mobile phone.
For ordinary Ukrainians who are not related to the Armed Forces and do not communicate with the military, the threat to the use of Telegram will be no more than from other messengers, the expert says. Especially when it comes to the news of the news from the Ukrainian media, official state bodies, including the Presidential Office or the General Staff, and correspondence with relatives or colleagues for household items.