Dutch police can request phone numbers and IP addresses of anonymous Telegram users. This is remarkable because Telegram says it does not share personal data with law enforcement agencies. Criminal lawyers are concerned because all this is done without court intervention. This is according to internal police documents that BNR has managed to get its hands on by invoking the Open Government Act (Woo).
The request forms contained instructions to "urgently" requisition IP addresses and phone numbers from Telegram. A police official tells BNR that such requests are considered if there is an "immediate imminent danger to life. The documents have been distributed since December 2022.
How often the Dutch police actually requested data using these request forms from Telegram is unknown. A spokesperson for the police department says this is not kept up to date. "We request a lot of data on a daily basis," she said.
The German Federal Criminal Police Office, on the other hand, does keep figures. The federal police of our eastern neighbors submitted 230 requests for IP addresses and phone numbers to Telegram last year. A total of 25 times the police received the requested data from the chat service.
It is remarkable that Telegram is simply handing over personal data to the police. The company's privacy policy states that Telegram only hands over an IP address and phone number to the police if it receives a court order stating that a user is a terror suspect. "So far, this has never happened," the chat service writes.
Criminal lawyers find it worrisome that investigating officers can demand private data from Telegram users without accountability. After all, the process does not involve the judge. "You have to justify this kind of means so the judge can test it," criminal lawyer Michel van Stratum told BNR. He fears that the use of encrypted and anonymous communication in our country is being surreptitiously criminalized.
According to the latest figures, Telegram has about 1.7 million users in the Netherlands. That the membership number is so high is because many Dutch people installed the app on their smartphones when WhatsApp announced in 2021 it was sharing user data with Facebook, in its own words to improve its service. This included device data, location data, IP addresses and phone numbers. Initially, WhatsApp required users to agree to the new terms by Feb. 8. If not, the platform threatened to delete accounts.
This caused much commotion among the more than two billion users worldwide. They felt they had their backs against the wall and WhatsApp was forcing them to agree to the new terms. The chat service decided to push the effective date forward a few months. This gave the company more time to explain the new terms and conditions.
Then further consternation ensued. The cause was a support page WhatsApp had put online. It stated that users who did not agree to the changed terms could only use a limited number of features. Thereupon, WhatsApp retracted this warning and promised not to mess with the app.
European privacy rules prevent WhatsApp from implementing these new terms in the EU. A subsidiary may not simply share user data with the parent company.
