Pavel Durov on end-to-end encryption | Lex Fridman Podcast Clips

So in 2013, when we were launching Telegram, we were aware of the serious issue with privacy that Edward Snowden made very clear. And we thought, yes, we're designing this product in a way that is already extremely secure, but we want to make sure that not even we can access user messages. And we understood very clearly that a bunch of people who were born in Russia don't necessarily inspire trust. So that's why we made Telegram open source—all our apps have been available on GitHub since 2013. And then we added end-to-end encryption in our secret chats, which WhatsApp copied a few years after—one year and three months ahead. They just started to test it. They rolled it out, I think, in 2016, which is three years after us. And the only reason, I think, the rest of the industry had to do it is because we set the standard.

It was incredibly important back in the day. At the same time, we realized certain limitations of end-to-end encryption. Within that design, that architecture, you can't support very large chat communities with persistent chat histories. You can't support huge one-to-many channels. You'd have issues with maintaining bots that have lots of incoming messages. Multiple device support becomes tricky. People will end up losing some of the documents they share. So we also saw those issues, and we ended up having this sort of hybrid experience where, depending on your use case and your requirements, you can choose the level of encryption that you want to have. That's why we chose to go opt-in for end-to-end encryption.