ERBIL, Kurdistan Region – The very popular communication app among Iranians, Telegram, has been disrupted in the last two days after the company allegedly said ‘no’ to Iranian officials’ request for using the tool to “spy on their citizens.”
“Iranian officials want to use telegram to spy on their citizens. We cannot and we will not help them with that,” Pavel Durov, the founder of top Russian social-networking company that created Telegram said in his twitter account on Tuesday.
“We ignored the demand, they blocked us,” Durov has added.
Iran’s Minister of Communication, Mahmoud Vaezi has denied the Telegram’s claim about the app filtering.“Our network was faced a major disruption on Tuesday,” Vaezi said.
It is due to two weeks of network trouble, he has added while insisting that the country is “respecting citizens’ privacy.”
This is not the first time that Iranian people face disruption in access to Telegram. Earlier in July, reports of major disruption of the app widely spread on local and foreign media. At that time, Vaezi blamed the company for its technical problems.
A growing number of Iranians are turned to using Telegram because of a popular belief that it is more secure than other social apps such as Viber. However, some Iranians still doubt the security of their privacy.
“I was always suspecting that Iranian officials have full access to our messages on Viber and Telegram, because they are the only apps were still working in Iran,” Farhad, a user from Iranian city of Tabriz posted on his Facebook account.
Mariam, another user from Tehran said, “you can never trust Iranian government. They want to control even the simplest things in our lives.”
A New-York-based rights group, the International Campaign for Human Rights in Iran, said in August that global Internet and technology companies should avoid putting Iranian users at risk by sharing their private information with the Iranian government.
They also called on Telegram earlier this year to issue periodic transparency reports to assure Iranian users that their online data are protected.
