"He has kind of an old-school cyber-libertarian world view where technology is there to set you free," Maréchal said. You may recall that, back when Facebook started changing WhatsApp’s terms of service, a number of news outlets reported on, and even recommended, switching to Telegram. Pavel Durov even said that users should delete WhatsApp “unless you are cool with all of your photos and messages becoming public one day.” But Telegram can’t be described as a more-secure version of WhatsApp. Oh no. There’s a certain degree of myth-making around what exactly went on, so take everything that follows lightly. Telegram was originally launched as a side project by the Durov brothers, with Nikolai handling the coding and Pavel as CEO, while both were at VK. In addition, Telegram's architecture limits the ability to slow the spread of false information: the lack of a central public feed, and the fact that comments are easily disabled in channels, reduce the space for public pushback. Messages are not fully encrypted by default. That means the company could, in theory, access the content of the messages, or be forced to hand over the data at the request of a government.
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