Telegram Was Taken Down From App Store Due to Child Pornography
Apple recently confirmed that Telegram apps had momentarily been taken down from iTunes and App Store due to child pornography contents.
The Telegram Messenger is one of the popular applications among Apple product users. It offers a secure exchange of text through end-to-end encryption as well as the synchronization of a user's messages from all their devices. These and a number of other services are for free.
On iTunes, Telegram Messenger is currently ranked as one of the top five social media apps on the entire platform. This means that when Telegram apps were suddenly removed and were unavailable last week, practically the whole world noticed.
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As soon as the news of Telegram's removal from the App Store spread, CEO Pavel Durov addressed the matter and said on Twitter: "We were alerted by Apple that inappropriate content was made available to our users and both apps were taken off the App Store. Once we have protections in place we expect the apps to be back on the App Store."
No further explanation were given until 9To5Mac reported that one of its readers had shared the response he had gotten from Apple's senior vice president of worldwide marketing, Phil Schiller, on the matter. In the message, Schiller was reportedly answering the reader's question and confirmed that the Telegram apps were plagued with child pornography contents.
"The Telegram apps were taken down off the App Store because the App Store team was alerted to illegal content, specifically child pornography, in the apps. After verifying the existence of the illegal content the team took the apps down from the store, alerted the developer, and notified the proper authorities, including the NCMEC (National Center for Missing and Exploited Children)," Schiller wrote.
Meanwhile, 9To5Mac suggested that the pornographic materials on the Telegram platform might have entered the application through one of the third-party plug-ins that was used on the Telegram apps.
Schiller also confirmed that Telegram was cooperative with Apple's efforts to resolve the issue even though it initially necessitated the removal of its applications.
The Telegram apps are now back on iTunes and the App Store after applying updates and "more controls" that are hoped to prevent the incident from happening again.
