Following a shift in its regulations due to the previous year’s arrest of its originator, the messaging service Telegram has significantly augmented its collaboration with law enforcement bodies worldwide, divulging information about thousands more users than it formerly did.

Within the United States, Telegram disclosed 108 user internet protocol addresses or phone annotations related to 14 cases throughout the initial nine months of 2024, as stated in the corporation’s quarterly transparency summaries. In the final quarter of the year, Telegram provided United States entities with IP addresses or phone references for 2,145 users resulting from 900 inquiries from law enforcement.

In August, French officials apprehended and charged Telegram’s creator Pavel Durov with facilitating drug trafficking and child exploitation on the application. By late September, Durov declared that the organization would commence sharing more information in acknowledgment of judicial requests from law enforcement authorities.

Data from the transparency report for 2024, compiled by Telegram users across over a dozen nations, illustrate the company’s adherence to that proclamation.

Throughout the first half of the year, Telegram furnished identifying information for merely 54 users to French authorities. From July to the conclusion of September, this surged to 632 users (Durov was apprehended on August 24). And during the last three months of the year, Telegram provided French officials data concerning 1,386 users.

In the United Kingdom, more than 98 percent of Telegram’s responses to law enforcement solicitations for user information were in the fourth quarter. In Finland, it reached 79 percent, and for Belgium, it was at 74 percent.

Among the nations included in the collaboratively-sourced Telegram transparency data that Gizmodo scrutinized, India experienced the highest level of collaboration between Telegram and law enforcement. Throughout 2024, the organization supplied IP locations or phone numbers for 23,535 users in reply to 14,641 requests from Indian authorities.

More than half of those requests—7,649—were made in the fourth quarter. However, unlike other countries where Telegram met few, if any, legal demands for user data from January to September, the figures from India reflect the company answering thousands of requests each quarter even prior to the regulatory changes.

Durov’s capture in France followed years of growing discontent among law enforcement bodies that the company wasn’t assisting in investigative processes to the extent expected from other social networking and messenger platforms.

Telegram, which permitted the creation of extensive group messages that, although unencrypted, were nonetheless more private than other social networking venues, gained popularity for various illicit activities.

When Durov declared Telegram’s initiative to start sharing more data with law enforcement, alongside adjustments to the platform’s search capabilities, he mentioned, “These actions should dissuade criminals … We won’t let bad actors compromise the integrity of our platform for nearly a billion users.”