There’s a weird rumor being spread in Iran about Telegram moving servers there. The idea of a privacy-oriented messaging app like Telegram moving its servers to a country with a history of Internet censorship is absurd and is hardly worth commenting on. However, it’s interesting to try to understand why such rumors appear in the first place. I can think of two reasons for that.

1. First, countries such as Iran or Russia usually try to pass laws ordering Internet companies to store private data on their territory. Sometimes officials in those countries make loud claims that turn out to be false (“Apple agreed to host private data of their users in our country”). It’s pretty obvious that Telegram can’t comply with any such demands due to our strict Privacy Policy. We won’t be able to put the privacy of our users at risk, even if rejecting such demands means getting blocked in some countries. We’d rather lose a big market (like we did in China) than compromise a single byte of private data of our users.

2. Second, some politicians and journalists discussing “servers” of a company in a country are confused about the terms and what they actually mean by “servers”. Along with a company’s servers that store private data in safe places, there also are internet providers that deliver encrypted traffic to users, and third party caching nodes (CDNs) that make sure popular public content doesn’t go twice around the globe every time to reach its users. If Telegram servers store data, these third parties merely provide connectivity between Telegram servers and its users.

It seems that politicians / journalists sometimes refer to an internet traffic provider or a CDN provider that delivers or caches encrypted data of Telegram as “Telegram” or “Telegram servers“, thus confusing the public. There’s a world of difference between them: Telegram servers store private data and will never “travel” to countries with internet censorship, while internet providers and CDNs operate all over the world and have no access to private data of Telegram (and other secure apps).

All popular apps have to work with ISPs and CDNs in order to make sure users can get their traffic in a fast and reliable way, but unlike some of them, we at Telegram are always 100% transparent about how we encrypt and store data. That's why I will soon share more details about how exactly Telegram plans to work with third parties such as CDN providers to guarantee speed and security for our users all around the globe.

However, while we keep researching ways to improve connectivity and speed for our users globally, there’s one thing we will never do: we will never change the location of our servers or change our Privacy Policy due to restricting laws or threats from local officials. The only party Telegram can be held responsible to is our users, and only our users can dictate us their wishes and demands.

Since some journalists don’t read my Telegram channel (a shame!), I made a Telegraph story about rumors on Telegram moving servers to weird places. It repeats some of the stuff from the last two posts from here, but could be useful as a summary of all our CDN-related posts. Spread the word!

http://telegra.ph/On-Rumors-About-Telegram-Servers-in-Weird-Places-07-30

I haven’t realized how many dedicated users we had in Indonesia until yesterday. I’m still excited by the warm reception in Jakarta. The amount of support and love I got during my yesterday’s visit there is incredible.

In addition to meeting local coders and early adopters of Telegram, I had a lunch with Mr. Rudiantara, the Minister of Communication of Indonesia. Our previous attempts to connect with Mr. Rudi failed because of unreceived e-mails (e-mail is unreliable – let us all switch to Telegram!), but in the end it was all for the best since we managed to establish a great personal connection.

There can’t be any secrets between Telegram and its users, since it’s you guys who made Telegram popular, not governments or shareholders or advertisers (it’s sad other IT companies sometimes forget that). So we organized a quick 15-minute press conference to inform the public about the contents of our meeting with Mr. Rudi.

As a result of this meeting, we've opened a direct channel of communication on Telegram between our teams to quickly eradicate public content that contains terrorist propaganda. We also added Indonesian speakers to our team, and all of this means that we'll be able to process reports about terrorist propaganda within a few hours instead of 1-2 days.

The Minister assured me that he shares our respect for privacy, and the right for privacy is guaranteed by the Constitution of Indonesia. I was happy to hear that, because - unfortunately - governments of some other big countries in Asia don’t always get it (yes, China, I am looking at you now).

We at Telegram are proud that we haven’t disclosed a single byte of private data to any third party since we started – and we are going to keep it that way, with no exceptions anywhere.

I also shared some Telegram growth stats at the quick press event yesterday:

- Every day, 600,000 new users sign up for Telegram globally.
- Every day, 20,000 new users sign up for Telegram from Indonesia.

Thanks for the support, Indonesia and the World!