The debate over digital privacy has intensified once again after the Supreme Court strongly reprimanded Meta and WhatsApp over the protection of user data. The court made it clear that any misuse of users’ personal information would not be tolerated. Soon after this warning, a controversy erupted online when Telegram founder and CEO Pavel Durov shared an old chat allegedly sent by Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg—raising fresh questions about how seriously big tech companies treat user privacy.
The leaked chat dates back to 2004, when Mark Zuckerberg was a student at Harvard University and had just launched Facebook. In the screenshot shared by Durov, Zuckerberg appears to be joking about collecting personal information such as email IDs, photos, addresses, and even Social Security numbers from fellow students who trusted him. Although the chat had been circulating online for years, Durov brought it back into the spotlight with a sharp and pointed remark.
Telegram CEO reignites privacy debate
Sharing the screenshot on social media, Pavel Durov remarked that the only thing that has changed since then is the scale. According to him, what once involved data from a few thousand people has now expanded to billions of users worldwide. His criticism was clearly aimed at Meta, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp.
Durov sarcastically suggested that earlier Zuckerberg had access to data from 4,000 people, but today Meta controls the information of nearly 4 billion users who trust platforms like WhatsApp. He questioned whether users should blindly believe WhatsApp’s repeated claims about privacy and security, especially end-to-end encryption.
Questions over WhatsApp’s privacy claims
WhatsApp maintains that its messages are protected through end-to-end encryption, meaning only the sender and receiver can read them. However, critics argue that even if message content is encrypted, Meta can still collect extensive metadata—such as who users talk to, how often, and for how long.
With the Supreme Court’s strict warning and the resurfacing of Zuckerberg’s old chat, concerns around data safety, trust, and accountability of big tech companies have once again come to the forefront. The episode has sparked renewed debate on how secure users’ personal information really is in the age of social media and messaging apps.
