Earlier this year, a Russian court ordered the Telegram messaging app to be blocked in the country after it failed to hand over encryption keys to the Federal Security Service (FSB). Now, Roskomnadzor, the Russian media regulator that instigated the court case, has said it is still willing to consider lifting the ban on the app if it agrees to follow the court order.

Posting to his Russian-language Telegram channel, Pavel Durov, the founder of Telegram, said that the company had re-worked it Privacy Policy to comply with GDPR. As part of the shake-up, section 8.3 reads: “If Telegram receives a court order that confirms you're a terror suspect, we may disclose your IP address and phone number to the relevant authorities. So far, this has never happened. When it does, we will include it in a semiannual transparency report published at: https://t.me/transparency.”

Durov said that despite this new rule change, Russia still wouldn’t unblock Telegram because it is after access to all messages. Durov said:

“Telegram in Russia is outlawed; Every day hundreds of IP addresses are blocked in attempts to stop access to the service. In this regard, we do not consider any calls from Russian services, and our privacy policy does not concern the situation in Russia. Therefore, we continue our resistance.”

Despite Roskomnadzor’s willingness to unblock Telegram, it seems the two entities will remain at an impasse unless the regulators restrict themselves to asking for only an IP address or telephone number, or arrange some other deal.

Since the ban in mid-April, Telegram has been piggybacking on proxy servers run by firms such as Google and Amazon in order to transmit data. In response, the Russian authorities have been blacklisting masses of IP address which has caused other services that rely on those IPs to be disrupted in the country.

Source: RT