Pavel Durov: prediction

Transcript context

…Another feature, on the more serious side, is end-to-end encryption. You led the industry in that. It was launched one year and three months ahead. Can you speak to why you decided to add end-to-end encryption and how you developed the encryption algorithm in the beginning? What was your thinking behind that? At 2013 when we were launching Telegram, we were aware of the serious issue with privacy that Edward Snowden made very clear. We thought, yes, we’re designing this product in a way that is already extremely secure, but we want to make sure that not even we can access user messages. We understood very clearly that a bunch of people who were born in Russia don’t necessarily inspire trust. That’s why we made Telegram open source, so all our apps have been available on GitHub since 2013 and then we added end-to-end encryption in our Secret Chats, which WhatsApp copied a few years after. One year and three months ahead they just started to test it. They rolled this out I think 2016, which is three years after us and the only reason I think the rest of the industry had to do it is because we set the standard. It was incredibly important back in the day and at the same time we realized certain limitations of end-to-end encryption. Within that design, that architecture, you can’t support very large chat communities with consistent persistent chat histories. You can’t support huge one-to-many channels. You’d have issues with maintaining bots that have lots of incoming messages. Multiple device support becomes tricky. People will end up losing some of the documents they share. We also saw a lot of issues and we ended up having this sort of hybrid experience where depending on your use case and your requirements, you can choose the level of encryption that we want to have. That’s why you chose to go opt-in for end-to-end encryption. The trade off there that you are describing is between for people who really care about specific messages, extreme privacy on those messages and usability, like being able to sync across multiple devices, having groups that are 200,000 people. All of those features, quality of life features, there’s a trade-off between those and end-to-end encryption. You lean towards letting users enable end-to-end encryption for cases when they want to be super secure.…

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