Lex Fridman: belief

Transcript context

…The way we designed Telegram is we never wanted to have any humans, any employees have any access to private messaging data. That’s why since 2012 when we’ve been trying to come up with this design, we always invested a lot of effort into making sure that nobody can mess with it. If you hire an employee or any of the existing employee, it can’t break the system in a way that would allow them to access messages of users. Then of course we launched end-to-end encrypted messaging that is even more protected, but it has certain limitations. So, you still have to rely on an encrypted cloud. So, an interesting engineering challenge was how you make sure that no point of failure can be created within your team or outside. So no employee can even access user messages. So, that’s the thing. We talk about encryption, we talk about privacy, we talk about security, all these kinds of things. I think the number one thing that people are concerned about, about which there’s also misinformation, is about private messages. So, Telegram is very, very protective of the private messages of users. So, you’re saying employees never can access the private messages. Have any governments or intelligence agencies ever accessed private user messages in the past? No, never. Telegram has never shared a single private message with anyone, including governments and intelligence services. If you try to access any server in any of the data center locations, it’s all encrypted. You can extract all the hard drives and analyze it, but you won’t get anything. It’s all encrypted in the way that is undecipherable. That was very important for us. That’s why we can say with confidence, there hasn’t been ever a leakage of data, any leak of data from Telegram. Not in terms of private messages, not in terms of say contact lists.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.