Messaging app Telegram said it would hand over users’ IP addresses and phone numbers to authorities with search warrants or other valid legal requests.
The change to its terms of service and privacy policy “should discourage criminals,” CEO Pavel Durov said in a Telegram post Monday.
“While 99.999% of Telegram users have nothing to do with crime, the 0.001% involved in illicit activities create a bad image for the entire platform, endangering the interests of our nearly 1 billion users,” he continued.
The announcement marks a significant turnaround for Mr. Durov, the platform’s Russian-born co-founder who was arrested by French authorities last month at an airport just north of Paris.
Days later, prosecutors charged him with facilitating criminal activity on the platform. The charges against him include complicity in the dissemination of child abuse images and drug trafficking. accused of failing to comply with law enforcement regulations.
Mr Durov, who has denied the charges, lashed out at authorities shortly after his arrest, saying holding him responsible for crimes committed by third parties on the platform was both “surprising” and “misguided”.
Critics say Telegram has become a hotbed of misinformation, child pornography and terrorism-related content, in part because of a feature that allows groups to have up to 200,000 members.
On the other hand, WhatsApp, owned by Meta, boundaries group sizes up to 1,000.
Last month, Telegram came under scrutiny for hosting far-right channels that contributed to violence in English cities.
Earlier this week, Ukraine banned the application on state-supplied devices in an effort to minimize threats posed by Russia.
The arrest of the 39-year-old CEO has sparked debate over the future of protecting free speech on the internet.
After Mr. Durov’s arrest, many people began to question whether Telegram was actually a safe place for political dissidents, according to John Scott-Railton, a senior researcher at the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab.
He says this latest policy change is already being met with even more concern in many communities.
“Telegram’s marketing as a platform that could withstand government demands attracted people who wanted to feel safe sharing their political views in countries like Russia, Belarus and the Middle East,” Scott-Railton said.
“Many are now looking at Telegram’s announcement with one fundamental question in mind: does this mean that the platform will start cooperating with the authorities of repressive regimes?”
Telegram did not provide much detail on how the company will handle requests from regime leaders in the future, he added.
Cybersecurity experts say that while Telegram has removed some groups in the past, its system for moderating extremist and illegal content is far weaker than that of competing social media companies and messaging apps.
Before the recent policy expansion, Telegram only provided information about terror suspects, according to 404 Media.
On Monday, Mr Durov said the app now uses “a dedicated team of moderators” who leverage artificial intelligence to hide problematic content from search results.
But making such material harder to find probably won’t be enough to meet the requirements of French or European legislation, according to Daphne Keller of Stanford University’s Center for Internet and Society.
“Anything that Telegram employees look at and can recognize with reasonable certainty is illegal, they should remove it entirely,” Keller said.
In some countries, they must also inform authorities of certain types of seriously illegal content, such as child sexual abuse material, she added.
Ms. Keller questioned whether the company’s changes would be enough to satisfy authorities seeking information about targets of investigations, including who they communicate with and the content of those messages.
“It sounds like a commitment that is probably less than what law enforcement wants,” Keller said.
