Telegram founder Pavel Durov takes a jibe at Facebook: Here’s what he said

“Telegram is a feature-rich social media platform that you can use to stay free from the Facebook-WhatsApp monopoly,” Telegram founder said.

FILE PHOTO: The Telegram logo is seen on a screen of a smartphone in this picture illustration taken April 13, 2018. REUTERS/Ilya Naymushin (REUTERS)

WhatsApp's new privacy policy has created a furore within the tech community wherein everyone is wondering if this is the time to move on from the popular messaging app. At a time when WhatsApp's privacy policy has become a topic of raging debate within the tech community, Telegram founder Pavel Durov has taken a jibe at Facebook while presenting his messaging app as a way to breaking the Facebook-WhatsApp monopoly.

“I don't see how these two apps can be compared. Telegram is a feature-rich social media platform that you can use to stay free from the Facebook-WhatsApp monopoly. Signal represents one feature of Telegram, which is Secret Chats. If you think you need a separate app for that feature only, installing it might make sense for you,” Durov said in his channel when he was asked to compare Telegram with US-based apps.

Apart from presenting Telegram as an alternative to WhatsApp, Durov also talked about the possibility of introducing ads on Telegram. He said that Telegram would never force users to view 30-second long ads. And if the platform ever took to displaying ads, they would not be based on users' private data.

“We will never force you to view 30-second ads on Telegram. If we ever introduce ads, the ads will be shown only in large one-to-many channels which are expensive to run due to server and traffic costs (like my channel @durov) and not targeted based on any private data (unlike Facebook). So, no collecting private data, no user profiling etc. And if you don't use our one-to-many channels (which are non-existent in all other messaging apps), you won't see a single ad,” he wrote in his channel.

Separately, the Telegram founder has also accused WhatsApp of covert marketing. “At about 500 million users and growing, Telegram has become a major problem for the Facebook corporation. Unable to compete with Telegram in quality and privacy, Facebook's WhatsApp seems to have switched to covert marketing: Wikipedia editors have recently exposed multiple paid bits adding biased information into the WhatsApp Wikipedia article,” he wrote in a separate post in his channel on Telegram.

Additionally, he claimed that Facebook has an entire department dedicated to determining the cause of Telegram's rising popularity. “I am happy to save Facebook tens of millions of dollars and give away our secret for free: respect your users.”