What Telegram Shares With Governments, and What It Keeps

Two promises, in Telegram's own words

Telegram's FAQ names two things it means by internet privacy: protecting your private conversations from snooping third parties such as officials or employers, and protecting your personal data from third parties such as marketers and advertisers. In its answer about the EU's data protection rules (GDPR) it adds that it does not use your data for ad targeting and does not sell it to others.

It also says what it does keep: only what it needs to work as a cloud service. That means your cloud chats, so they open on any device without a separate backup, and your contacts, so you can find the people you know.

The rest of this page sets those promises next to the more specific rules in the Privacy Policy, because the two read differently once a court or police force is involved.

What Telegram can hand over, and when

What	What the official documents say
Secret Chats	End-to-end encrypted, so Telegram has no data to disclose (FAQ)
Regular cloud chats	Stored in several data centres run by different legal entities in different countries, with the decryption keys split up and kept apart from the data. Court orders from several jurisdictions would be needed to force any data out (FAQ)
Message content so far	"To this day, we have disclosed 0 bytes of user messages to third parties, including governments." (FAQ)
Your IP address and phone number	If Telegram receives a valid order from the relevant judicial authorities confirming you are a suspect in a criminal case that violates its Terms of Service, it will analyse the request and may disclose them. Any such disclosure goes into a quarterly transparency report at t.me/transparency (Privacy Policy 8.3)
Account metadata	To fight spam and abuse, Telegram may collect metadata such as your IP address, the devices and apps you used and your username history, and keep it for 12 months at most (Privacy Policy 5.2)

Put simply: Telegram says it does not hand over what you wrote, but it can hand over who you are, meaning the IP address and phone number behind an account, when a court order about a crime reaches it. "Telegram hides you from everyone" is not what its own policy says.

Features that send text to other companies

Two features you switch on yourself send data outside Telegram, and the Privacy Policy names the companies involved.

Feature	What goes out	To whom
Translate	The text of the message or messages you choose to translate	Google or Microsoft, which may use it only to translate
Voice-to-text (Telegram Premium)	Only the audio of the voice or video message you convert, without your IP address or account details	Google, which will not log the audio or transcript

For anything sensitive, leave these off or talk in a Secret Chat, where the message never sits on Telegram's servers in readable form.

Getting a copy of your data

The FAQ says you can use the official @EURegulation bot to request a copy of all the data Telegram stores about you, and to contact Telegram about data privacy. Its /access command leaves the request.

For your own chats, Telegram Desktop can save them to your computer: Settings › Advanced › Export Telegram data. Remember that the exported folder is an ordinary set of files with none of Telegram's protection, so decide where to keep it before you create it.

Deleting your data yourself

You do not have to ask anyone to remove most of what Telegram holds about you.

• Messages. In one-to-one chats either side can delete any message for both sides, with no time limit (Privacy Policy 10.2). In large groups, admins can still see deleted messages for 48 hours in Recent Actions. Sending, editing and deleting a message shows how.
• Uploaded contacts. Delete Synced Contacts removes them; turn Sync Contacts off so they are not uploaded again.
• Saved payment details. Clear Payment and Shipping Info removes what you entered when paying through a bot.
• The whole account, if you stop using it. If away for sets how long you can stay offline before your account is deleted with all its messages and contacts.

Device	Where these settings are
Android	Settings tab › Privacy and Security, near the bottom
iPhone	Settings › Privacy and Security; the contact options are under Data Settings
Computer	Settings › Privacy and Security for the account timer and payment info. Contacts are synced from your phone, so delete them there

To delete your account now rather than wait, use Telegram's deactivation page. According to the Privacy Policy this removes all your messages, media and contacts from the Telegram cloud, has to be confirmed through your Telegram account, and cannot be undone. The FAQ adds two things people do not expect: groups and channels you created stay behind without a creator, with their admins keeping their rights, and the people you wrote to keep their own copies of your messages.

Illegal public content is a different case

Private chats and private groups belong to their participants, and the FAQ says Telegram does not process requests about them. Public content is different: for public channels, groups, bots and sticker sets, Telegram checks reports of illegal content and takes it down when it decides that is appropriate. It also says it will not join politically motivated censorship, such as removing peaceful criticism of a government.

Every app has a Report option on messages, chats and profiles. Reports can also be emailed to abuse@telegram.org with a link to the content, and if someone is pretending to be you, the FAQ points to @NoToScam.

Next step: Telegram on several devices: how sessions work. For why Telegram keeps chats in the cloud at all, see Why Telegram keeps your chats in the cloud.