The co-founder of Telegram reveals the "secret" is leak of WhatsApp users to his application
Written on: January 10, 2021
Pável Dúrov assures that the American company is unable to compete with Telegram in terms of quality and privacy
The co-founder of Telegram, Pável Dúrov, has revealed the reason why there is a leak of WhatsApp users to his instant messaging application, according to a statement published this Friday on his official Telegram channel.
"I hear that Facebook has an entire department dedicated to discovering why Telegram is so popular. Imagine dozens of employees working on it full time," the text reads. "I'm happy to save Facebook tens of millions of dollars and give away our secret for free: respect your users," he adds.
What happened?
In this sense, the Russian entrepreneur points out that millions of people are outraged after the announcement of WhatsApp, which reported that as of February 8, it will share data with Facebook, a platform to which it has belonged since 2014.
WhatsApp's new usage policies have sparked controversy and concerns about privacy because the tech giant will have access to contacts, mobile device information and users' location, among other data.
Dúrov assures that "it is not surprising that the flight of WhatsApp users to Telegram has accelerated", arguing that this situation has been happening for years. "Telegram has become a major problem for the Facebook corporation," he notes.
"Covert Marketing"
The Telegram co-founder maintains that, faced with this inability to compete with his application in terms of quality and privacy, these companies appear to have opted for "covert 'marketing', taking as an example that recently several paid bots added biased information in the Wikipedia article dedicated to WhatsApp.
He also highlights that they have detected bots that spread inaccurate information about their application on social networks, such as claiming that Telegram is a Russian company, that it does not use open source or that it is not encrypted.
"Unlike Facebook, Telegram does not spend money, much less billions of dollars, on 'marketing'," says Dúrov. "We believe that people are smart enough to choose what is best for them and, judging by the 500 million people who use Telegram, this belief is justified," he concludes.
