Will Pavel Durov return to Russia and how does the Western media see it?

On December 17, it became known that due to the problems caused by the temporary blocking of the WhatsApp messenger in Brazil, 5.7 million new users connected to the Telegram of Pavel Durov, the founder of the largest social network in Russia , VKontakte . Telegram is positioned as the “fastest and safest” messenger. However, security almost got him sideways.

In November, the first deputy head of the constitutional committee of the State Duma, Alexander Ageev, addressed the FSB with a proposal to restrict Russians' access to the Telegram messenger. He also noted that the media had information about the possible use of the messenger by the perpetrators of the terrorist attacks in Paris on November 13. On December 16, the Russian authorities denied a possible Telegram ban.

For the messenger, MTProto protocol was created, which implies the use of several encryption protocols. Using the Diffie-Hellman algorithm and other device-level encryption technologies (end-to-end encryption) provides security, according to Durov. Protection against the interception of forwarded messages from the Telegram server side is provided only in the mode of “secret” chats (Secret Chats), available from October 8, 2013. However, not everyone agrees that Telegram is the safest messenger.
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On November 3, ex-US intelligence officer Edward Snowden called a mobile messenger, which he considers the most protected from wiretapping. This is a Signal iOS application, not a Telegram.

Nevertheless, the Durov messenger does not cease to be a source of new informational reasons. Accordingly, the interest in the person of Pavel Durov, including from the Western media, does not abate.

CNN Money offers a new selection of interesting facts about the entrepreneur. To some extent, they reflect the idea of ​​the West about his person.

1. Pavel Durov is called the “Russian Zuckerberg”

In 2006, he founded the social network Vkontakte, which became “Russian Facebook”.

2. In Russia, Durov is considered a disgraced businessman

In 2014, he decided to flee the country. He refused to disclose to the Russian authorities the personal data of Ukrainian users of VKontakte, which the Kremlin “hunted”. Now the government is allegedly in the hands of not only its social network, but also the entire Russian Internet.

3. Pavel Durov offered a job to Edward Snowden

In 2013, Pavel Durov suggested that former CIA officer Edward Snowden, who declassified information about the surveillance of American intelligence services over Internet users, to protect the users' data as part of a team of social network programmers. Speaking about Snowden getting asylum in Russia, the founder of "Vkontakte" said: "At such moments you feel pride in our country and regret over the course of the United States - a country that betrays the principles on which it was once built."

4. He’s more worried about defenses against surveillance than terrorist threats.

“Every year, thousands of times more people die from accidents in the bathroom than from terrorist attacks. But if tomorrow the special services of the United States or another country decide to install video cameras in our bathrooms for “our own safety,” we will still glue their lenses. Because our personal life is not their business. I am far from politics and cannot lobby for bans on total surveillance. But there is something that we - IT entrepreneurs and programmers - can do. We can develop and finance technologies aimed at ensuring that total surveillance is technically impossible. So we can glue the lens of a global video camera called PRISM, and not only him, ”he writes.

5. Pavel Durov does his business not for money

In 2012, Pavel Durov donated $ 1 million to Wikipedia because it seemed to him that the world needed more open information. “Today it seems to me that the problem with the openness of information has faded into the background; Now is the time to close personal information, ”the entrepreneur believes.

As for the monetization of Telegram, Durov does not set such a goal yet. In the development of the messenger, he invested his own funds.

True, at the end of September, he announced the appearance of a special application programming interface (API) in the service, which would provide an opportunity for user fees for bot developers.

6. He is a traveler and a talented photographer.

Durov travels around the world, and his Instagram is full of photos from cities such as Barcelona, ​​San Francisco, New York, Rome. Some of the photos made by him.

7. He believes that countries are an “outdated concept”

Durov does not regret that he left Russia, because Telegram is more successful than VKontakte. Nevertheless, Durov did not rule out that at some point he might return to Russia. "But I'm not sure that I have a desire to return there permanently," he warned.

“I think we should be less dependent on such an outdated concept that we call countries,” said Pavel Durov.