TBF it was a court order, not just a police request. Not defending Telegram though.

There's a whole bunch of russians moderators of protest channels who get raided because they think telegram is secure, while in reality it's very easy to leak your phone, which can be used to find where you are. And now they want to monetize anonymity by tying it to crypto that most people will buy with their own cards and can be traced to legal id. Think of it what you will, but personally I will not be using neither recommending anyone to use telegram.

That's why they're introducing No-SIM signup, so that they don't have to give away data that can be tracked.

IPs are a bit tricky to handle though, because they're required to be stored for session management since Telegram is cross-platform and has independent multi-device login.

yes

And they're very possibly sharing chat metadata with Russian intelligence services https://www.pwnallthethings.com/p/russia-is-spying-on-telegr...

The article is incredibly patronizing, while being also incredibly stupid. If the orcs were half as smart as would be needed to extract metadata from (poorly) encrypted traffic, they would just sidestep that altogether by adding a second device to the Ihor's Telegram account. That would have given them plaintext.

This low-tech "attack" would also work even better with WhatsApp and Signal (better because in Telegram secret chats don't get shared between multiple devices while in WhatsApp and Signal they obviously are - cause every chat is encrypted).