Risks for crypto users on Telegram

Author: Veronica Irwin Source: unchainedcrypto Translation: Shan Ouba, Golden Finance

Last month, the founder of the instant messaging app Telegram, Pavel Durov, was arrested in Paris for failing to prevent illegal activity on the app. On Thursday, the app updated its FAQ page to clarify its policy on bad content moderation.  

Telegram, which is loved by the crypto community, has kept its policies and technology unchanged, and "the changes to the FAQ simply make it clearer how to report content on Telegram, including through the Digital Services Act," a regulation passed by the European Union in 2022 that details the obligations of digital services to their users.  

Telegram founder Pavel Durov told his followers in a Telegram post last Friday that the platform would make changes to the way it moderates content, but did not provide details. “While 99.999% of Telegram users have nothing to do with crime, the 0.001% that engage in illegal activity damages the image of the entire platform and puts the interests of our nearly one billion users at risk,” Durov wrote. “That’s why this year we’ve committed to shifting content moderation on Telegram from the realm of criticism to the realm of praise.”

The platform’s FAQ page now clearly states how users should report “illegal content” on the platform. However, little is known about how the platform plans to handle flagged content, according to Eva Galperin, director of cybersecurity at the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). “Only Telegram can answer that question,” she said. Telegram declined to explain to Unchained what happens after reporting illegal content.

Even leaving aside any upcoming changes to Telegram’s content moderation practices, there are several important steps that cryptocurrency users should take if they rely on the platform for secure communications.

Message Security

Galperin, who wrote a harm reduction guide for Telegram users in Ukraine and Russia in 2022, told Unchained that many of the security measures that cryptocurrency users think they have on Telegram are based on "obfuscation." In reality, only private messages with "Secret Chat" mode turned on are end-to-end encrypted, which is not the default network setting. If a message is not end-to-end encrypted, it means Telegram has access to its content. Unlike the settings on rival communications platforms Signal and Facebook Messenger, end-to-end encryption is not the default setting for private messages.

The best way to protect your chats from content moderation on Telegram, she said, is to make sure this setting is enabled in your private chats. Telegram told Unchained that encrypted secret chats are "guaranteed to have no backdoors," and that this can be verified by reviewing the app's open source code.

However, many cybersecurity experts, such as Johns Hopkins University cryptographer Matthew Green, have questioned the strength of Telegram's encryption technology itself, arguing that the platform's encryption protocol, MTProto 2.0, has not been as extensively peer-reviewed and tested as other encryption protocols used by apps like Signal. 

Galperin said Telegram users ultimately have to decide how much they trust the company, or even Durov himself, to decide whether they should use the platform.  

Anonymity Risks 

Even when private communications are properly encrypted, their contents often appear in testimony when members of both parties take screenshots and reveal them to authorities. Sources have repeatedly turned over encrypted messages to U.S. authorities prosecuting individuals involved in the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol.

Specifically, in the cryptocurrency space, anonymous accounts are very common, meaning that users often send messages to others without knowing the other person's true identity. This poses a huge risk if the anonymous communicator turns out to be someone with different loyalties or plans than expected. "You need to trust the other person you are talking to, because each of them may betray you," Galperin said. In addition, particularly sensitive information, such as wallet addresses, should never be shared with people you don't know well.  

Different laws in different countries

Telegram's FAQ explicitly states that users can report "illegal" content, but laws vary from country to country. For example, speech that may be protected under the First Amendment in the United States may be considered "hate speech" in Europe.  

Specifically, laws regarding cryptocurrency vary greatly from country to country. For example, it is illegal to use Bitcoin in Saudi Arabia, while it is legal in the United States. This provides an opportunity for users in Saudi Arabia, for example, to mark communications about Bitcoin as "illegal content" in their country, which could cause problems for users in other jurisdictions if Telegram eventually blocks such content. Therefore, Galperin advises Telegram users to make sure what they are doing is not illegal in their country.

Finally, Galperin said that users who are concerned about the privacy of their communications should not use Telegram at all. Personally, she recommends using Signal because it is a peer-reviewed encryption technology tool that has been verified by trusted cybersecurity experts.