Pavel Durov: “Snowden is my hero”

In an interview with CBS channel, the founder of VKontakte and subsequently Telegram messenger Pavel Durov spoke about his attitude to Edward Snowden. According to the head of Telegram, the former employee of the CIA and the NSA is a real hero, and his information shocked Durov.

Initially, he believed that the authorities of the United States and Great Britain would never watch over their citizens, and Snowden's revelations destroyed his ideas about the Western world and democratic society.
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“I was grateful to him for telling the world about the existence of this surveillance,” Durov said in an interview with CBS.

Objectively, Durov's position on this issue was somewhat naive - the founder of VKontakte constantly stated the importance of confidentiality of user data and it would be strange to assume that in other regions an excellent attitude to surveillance by the special services.

Subsequently, he even sent a proposal to join the VKontakte team as the lead programmer, but Snowden did not respond to the job offer. Last year, some security specialists had a few questions about the Telegram service - the messenger stored messages on servers, which was a potential threat to users. Malefactors could get access to the Telegram servers and subsequently to all correspondence.

Despite this, Snowden claimed that he respected Pavel Durov as a specialist, even taking into account the existing vulnerabilities in Telegram. The service periodically eliminates vulnerabilities, and also provides users with the ability to use secret chats, during the creation of which information is stored only on the devices of those who participate in the correspondence. Getting access to information from this type of chat is much more difficult.