Censorship and privacy

 In 2018, Russia tried to block Telegram, after it Pavel Durov rejected to meet the new Russian's law requirements.

The Yarovaya's law, which requires operators to save all voice and text messages of their customers for six months, and their internet traffic for 30 days, went into effect in Russia on July 1, 2018.

The position of Moscow's Meschansky district court is that, in accordance with the Yarovaya's law, social networks are required to store encryption keys from all user correspondence and provide them to Russia's Federal Security Service upon request. Telegram management insisted that this requirement is technically impossible, because keys of opt-in secret chats are stored on users' devices and are not in Telegram's possession. Pavel Durov, Telegram's co-founder, said that the  Federal Security Service demands violate the constitutional rights of russians to the privacy of correspondence.

On 13 April 2018 Moscow's Tagansky District Court has ruled, with immediate effect, on blocking access to Telegram in Russia. Telegram has appealed to the Russian Supreme Court, but the request had been declined.

In April 2020, the Government of Russia used the blocked Telegram platform to spread information related to COVID-19 pandemic.

On 18 June 2020 Roskomnadzor lifted the ban of Telegram after the company had "agreed to help with extremism investigations". The court ruling which was the basis of original ban is still in force, which makes the lifting illegal.



In 2019 Facebook admitted that it had stored hundred millions of passwords in plain text.

The discovery was made in January 2019, said Facebook’s Pedro Canahuati, as part of a routine security review. He stated that none of the passwords were visible to anyone outside Facebook. Facebook had admitted the security breach months later, after Krebs said that logs were accessible to some 2,000 engineers and developers.

Krebs had stated that the bug dated back to 2012.

Passwords should always be encrypted in an unreadable format, but the social media company admitted  that hundreds of millions of Facebook users and tens of thousands of Instagram users have been affected by the error.

The company urged users to change their password and also consider enabling additional security features such as two-factor authentication.


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