KOCHI: The state police on Monday told the High Court that social media app ‘Telegram’ was providing anonymity to users and was being widely used by criminals for propagating pornographic materials and committing financial frauds. In an affidavit, A Syamkumar, operations officer of Cyber Dome, Thiruvananthapuram, submitted that group members were identified by user IDs instead of mobile phone numbers, which ensured anonymity to its users unlike WhatsApp.
“Telegram users can hide their registered mobile numbers even from the admins of groups or channels and still send text, images, videos or files anonymously. The app also supports secret chats besides the end-to-end encryption,” said the affidavit, which was filed in response to a petition by Athena Solomon, an LLM student, seeking to ban Telegram for promoting child abuse videos and terrorism.
The affidavit said the police were facing difficulty while dealing with the app. Telegram did not provide data to law enforcement support. “Telegram services are hosted outside the country and they have not given any subscriber details to law enforcement agencies yet. Concealment of registered mobile numbers makes it impossible for agencies to collect account details from service providers,” it said.