“Privacy is not for sale, and human rights should not be compromised out of fear or greed.”
— Pavel Durov
Posted on Durov's Telegram channel, April 13, 2018, the day a Moscow court ordered Telegram blocked in Russia for refusing to hand over encryption keys.
April 2014. Saint Petersburg. They took VKontakte from me because I refused to hand over user data. I left Russia with one bag. No home, no country, no net. They wanted me to break. I chose to disappear. That year I started Telegram, stateless, hunted, free. Today it has over a billion users. What they tried to take became the reason I built something they could never control. Your integrity under pressure is your most powerful asset. Do not sell it.