The gateway sends users’ Telegram name, username, and profile picture to the website owner, while users’ phone number remains hidden. It features a website widget that could be embedded into websites, allowing users to sign into a third party website with their Telegram account. In February 2018, Telegram launched their social login feature to its users, named Telegram Login.
- In March 2021, Telegram launched a bonds offering to cover the debt and fund further growth of the app.
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- In addition, Telegram offers functions for making payments directly within the platform, alongside an external service such as Stripe.
- An investigation published in August 2024 by the BBC showed that Telegram has not responded to requests to join the US–based National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC), nor from the UK–based Internet Watch Foundation, both non–profit NGOs.
- In the same year, Telegram reportedly banned more than 350,000 bots and channels, including those that contained child abuse and terrorism-related content.
- Telegram added group voice chats in December 2020 and group video chats in June 2021.
By March 2018, that number had doubled, with Telegram reaching 200 million monthly active users. On 24 March 2014, Telegram announced that it had reached 35 million monthly users and 15 million daily active users. The company says this is done “to protect the data that is not covered by end-to-end encryption”. It does not disclose where it rents offices or which legal entities it uses to rent them, citing the need to “shelter the team from unnecessary influence” and protect users from governmental data requests. As of March 2025,update Telegram has more than 1 billion monthly active https://chickenroadapp.in/ users, with India as the country with the most users. The company’s founder has said he wants the app to have an anti-censorship tool for Iran and China similar to the app’s role in fighting censorship in Russia.
Privacy and security features
When typing in an emoji, the user is offered to send the respective sticker instead. The gateway is integrated with a bot, which is linked with the developer’s specific website domain. The gateway sends the user’s Telegram name, username, and profile picture to the website owner, while the user’s phone number remains hidden. Bots power Telegram’s gaming platform, which utilizes HTML5, so games are loaded on-demand as needed, like ordinary webpages.
Any user can also send a message to a special “Saved Messages” chat as a form of bookmarking them. Sticker packs are made by Telegram designers as well as regular users and can be shared via links. Reactions can be used to respond to a message with emoji, with Premium users having access to more reaction choices and the ability to leave more reactions per message. As users can be logged into many devices at once, starting to type a message on one of them will create a “cloud draft” that syncs with others, so typing can be started on a phone and finished on a laptop, for example.
Users can schedule messages to send at a particular time or when their conversation partner comes online, as well as choose to send a message “without sound” without a notification. Some stickers feature full-screen effects that play out when first sent or when tapped. By default, any account that is inactive for 6 months is automatically deleted, though the period can be shortened or extended up to 18 months through the Settings menu. In October 2014, South Korean government surveillance plans drove many of its citizens to switch to Telegram from the Korean app KakaoTalk. Users can use Telegram’s transparency bot to check how many legal requests from their country it has processed.
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In July 2023, Telegram surpassed 800 million monthly active users, later reaching 900 million in March 2024 and 950 million in July 2024. On 19 June 2022, Telegram announced that it had reached 700 million monthly active users. On 8 January 2021, Pavel announced in a blog post that Telegram had reached “about 500 million” monthly active users. On 24 April 2020, Telegram announced that it had reached 400 million monthly active users. According to the US Securities and Exchange Commission, as of October 2019, Telegram had 300 million monthly active users worldwide.
When you use Gmail on your computer, you have additional theme options, such as personal photos from Google Photos. For example, you can change the theme from light to dark.
A distinctive feature of this version is the ability to view channels/groups on a specific topic without censorship, which cannot be viewed from an app distributed from Google Play or the Apple Store due to their policies.citation needed For encrypted chats (branded as Secret Chats), Telegram uses a custom-built symmetric encryption scheme called MTProto. In October 2024, Telegram launched a verification platform, called Telegram Gateway, allowing third-party services to authenticate their users by sending verification codes via Telegram. In December 2020, Telegram launched a Bugs and Suggestions platform, where users can submit bug reports and suggestion cards for new features. Telegraph natively supports Instant View, a feature which lets users read full articles in the chat with no load time and without opening an external browser. These collectible gifts are registered on the TON blockchain as a form of NFT and can then be traded or sold both on the Telegram platform via the in-app Gift Marketplace or via outside platforms and marketplaces.
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Examples of platforms providing Telegram bot integration include respond.io, Manychat and Trengo. In June 2015, Telegram launched a platform for third-party developers to create bots. The interface shows users a visual representation of their storage usage and also lets them sort their cached media by size to clear specific items.
Bot abuse
But according to Pavel, Telegram disclosed data for 203 legal requests from the Brazilian government in January to September 2024 and 6,992 legal requests from India, its largest market, during that period. Its data centers are spread across a complex corporate structure of shell companies in various jurisdictions to avoid compliance with government subpoenas. Telegram is registered as a company in the British Virgin Islands and as an LLC in Dubai. It was the most downloaded app worldwide in January 2021, with 1 billion downloads globally as of late August 2021. Its servers are distributed worldwide with several data centers, and its headquarters are in Dubai, United Arab Emirates. You can change the theme of Google Maps on your mobile device.
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- In September 2024, Telegram announced that it would begin to hand over users’ IP addresses and phone numbers to authorities who have search warrants or other valid legal requests.
- It is automatically updated and will most likely get new versions faster than the apps in the Play Store and App Store.
- It was the most downloaded app worldwide in January 2021, with 1 billion downloads globally as of late August 2021.
- Criticisms were also aimed at Telegram’s use of a custom-designed encryption protocol.
- Premium users have access to extra stickers, emoji, reactions, and customization features like a special badge and the ability to change the look of their messages in chats.
- Telegram has stated that the company will never serve advertisements in private chats.
An investigation published in August 2024 by the BBC showed that Telegram has not responded to requests to join the US–based National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC), nor from the UK–based Internet Watch Foundation, both non–profit NGOs. In January 2021, North Macedonian media outlets reported that a now-banned Telegram group, with more than 7,000 members, titled “Public Room” (“Јавна соба”) was used to share nude photos of women, often young teenage girls. It also provides an email address dedicated to reports of content related to child abuse. Telegram has been used to distribute illegal pornography, including child pornography. Telegram’s CEO then said that the requested data was technologically impossible to obtain. On 26 April 2023, Telegram was temporarily suspended in Brazil and fined R$1 million (2023) (US$185,528.76) per day for not complying with a Federal Police investigation into neo-Nazi activities on the platform.
Any Telegram content is synced between the user’s logged-in devices automatically through cloud storage, except for device-specific secret chats. In February 2016, Telegram announced that it had 100 million monthly active users, with 350,000 new users signing up every day, delivering 15 billion messages daily. In December 2014, Telegram announced that it had 50 million active users, generating 1 billion daily messages, and that it had 1 million new users signing up on its service every week, traffic doubled in five months with 2 billion daily messages. Telegram also has social networking features, allowing users to post stories, create large public groups with up to 200,000 members, or share one-way updates to unlimited audiences in so-called channels. Telegram offers end-to-end encryption in voice and video calls, and optionally in private chats if both participants use a mobile device. It allows users to exchange messages, share media and files, and hold private and group voice or video calls as well as public livestreams.
Channels offer detailed statistics on view counts, user growth and interactions, also visible only to admins. Posting in the channel is anonymous, though admins can choose to add signatures to their posts. Secret Chats support perfect forward secrecy and switch encryption keys after a key has been used 100 times or a week has passed. Forwarded messages also maintain reply formatting, able to show which messages in a thread are replying to others.
Following efforts by Telegram to remove ISIS-related content from the platform, the terrorist organization reportedly moved its recruitment groups to the dark web, with US officials citing the app’s purging of terrorist content as particularly effective at deplatforming ISIS. The app has been criticized by numerous research institutions and internet monitoring bodies because violent organizations like ISIS, Proud Boys and the Myanmar junta used it to communicate, both privately between members and publicly through channel posts. The ban applied to non-U.S.-based purchasers as well, because Telegram could not prevent the re-sale of Grams to U.S. citizens on a secondary market, as the anonymity of users was one of the key features of TON. Durov planned to power TON with the existing Telegram user base, and turn it into the largest blockchain and a platform for apps and services akin to a decentralized WeChat, Google Play, and App Store. Telegram has stated that the company will never serve advertisements in private chats.
Telegram messages in private chats can be edited up to 48 hours after they were sent with an “edited” icon appearing to reflect changes, as well as deleted for both sides without a trace. In September 2015, Telegram announced that the app had 60 million active users and delivered 12 billion daily messages. The National Security and Defense Council of Ukraine enforced the restrictions following evidence reported to them by Kyrylo Budanov, showing Russia’s ability to access messages and user data on the platform. They criticized how, unless modified first, the default general security model stores all contacts, messages and media together with their decryption keys on its servers continuously; and that it does not enable end-to-end encryption for messages by default. Telegram responded to the BBC’s reporting, stating that Telegram “proactively moderates harmful content on its platform including child abuse material”, and that its moderation is “within industry standards and constantly improving”.
Russian use for destabilization activities
Other news services with official channels on the platform include the Financial Times, Business Insider and The New York Times. Users with a Telegram Premium subscription have a number of “boosts” that they can give to channels, which allow the channel to “level up” and unlock features, such as the ability to customize messages or post stories as the channel. When forwarded, polls retain the answer data and any votes cast in other chats will count toward the overall total. Users can freely join public chats and find them using the in-app search function, while private chats require an invitation. Groups are large multi-user chats that support up to 200,000 members and can be public or private.
The desktop clients, excluding the macOS client, do not feature options for end-to-end encrypted messages. This partially addresses the concern about the lack of scrutiny while confirming the formal security of the protocol’s latest version. In December 2020, a study titled “Automated Symbolic Verification of Telegram’s MTProto 2.0” was published, confirming the security of the updated MTProto 2.0 and reviewing it while pointing out several theoretical vulnerabilities. Criticisms were also aimed at Telegram’s use of a custom-designed encryption protocol.
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It is estimated that the bot contains data from 26 million Ukrainians registered in the Diia application. Volodymyr Flents, the chairman of the public organization “Electronic Democracy”, announced on 11 May 2020 that a Telegram bot appeared on the Web, which sold the personal data of Ukrainian citizens. The group was banned after reports from users and media, although no public statement was made. The company has a verified channel called “Stop Child Abuse”, where daily statistics on the number of groups and channels banned for sharing illegal materials are posted. Twelve days later, Telegram told its users that the Brazilian Congressional Bill No. 2630 against online disinformation, which was about to be approved, would end freedom of speech in the country. Throughout 2020, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps used groups and channels to dox Iraqi and Iranian citizens, while sharing propagandistic posts on the platform.
Portions of this content are ©1998–2025 by individual mozilla.org contributors. See Troubleshoot extensions, themes and hardware acceleration issues to solve common Firefox problems for instructions. On 24 August 2024, Pavel Durov, who is both a French and UAE citizen, was arrested in France by French authorities.
The Telegram team tweeted that it was either because the user had malware or they were not using two-step verification. On 9 June 2019, The Intercept released leaked Telegram messages exchanged between current Brazilian Minister of Justice and former judge Sérgio Moro and federal prosecutors. Login SMS messages are known to have been intercepted in Iran, Russia and Germany, possibly in coordination with phone or telecom companies. In April 2016, several Russian opposition members’ accounts were hijacked by intercepting the SMS messages used for login authorization. MTProto 2.0 is seen by qualified cryptographers as a vast improvement to Telegram’s security.
In September 2024, Telegram announced that it would begin to hand over users’ IP addresses and phone numbers to authorities who have search warrants or other valid legal requests. Such content is usually linked to Telegram allowing misinformation on the platform as, according to Pavel Durov, “conspiracy theories only strengthen each time their content is removed by moderators”. In 2017, in an attempt to monetize Telegram without advertising, the company began the development of a blockchain platform dubbed either “The Open Network” or “Telegram Open Network” (TON) and its native cryptocurrency “Gram”. According to him, these features will require more bandwidth and the added cost will be covered by the feature prices, in addition to covering some of the costs incurred by regular users. After the shutdown of the TON project, the company needed to repay the investors the money that was not spent on its development during 2018 and the beginning of 2019, while the project was active.