About 25 million users have signed up for the Telegram messaging platform in the past 72 hours, its founder, the Russian Pável Dúrov, said Tuesday in response to competitor WhatsApp’s announcement that it will share more data with its parent company, Facebook. .
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During the first week of January, Telegram exceeded 500 million monthly active users. After that, it continued to grow: 25 million new users came to Telegram in the last 72 hours“Dúrov assured in his channel in the network.
“This is a significant increase from last year,” he continued, adding that Telegram had already had sudden waves of registration during its “seven years of experience protecting the privacy of its users,” but “this time is different” .
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“People no longer trade their privacy for free services. They no longer want to be held hostage by technical monopolies,” added the 36-year-old billionaire.
Telegram was marketed in 2013.
Without mentioning the competition, it refers to WhatsApp, which has been under fire from criticism since last Thursday after asking its two billion subscribers to accept new terms of use.
The users they decline will no longer be able to access their accounts from February 8. In this way, the group aims to make its platform profitable by enabling advertisers to contact their customers via WhatsApp and even sell their products directly, as is already the case in India.
(Also read: What’s changing with the new WhatsApp privacy policy?)
This announcement also affected another messaging app, Signal, which has been on the list of most downloaded on the Apple Store and Google Play platforms in various countries since last week.
Founded in 2013 by brothers Pável and Nikolái Dúrov, creators for the popular Russian social network VKontakte, Telegram affirms that security is its priority and generally refuses to cooperate with the authorities, leading to blockade attempts in some countries, on all in Russia.
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AFP