The municipality of Amsterdam has barred its civil servants from using the encrypted messaging service Telegram on their work phones, citing alleged criminal activities on the app and the risk of espionage, the radio broadcaster BNR reported on Monday.
A spokesperson for Amsterdam IT councilor Alexander Scholtes confirmed the move to BNR, stating that the ban was enacted in late April but had not been publicly communicated.
Telegram is a “safe haven for hackers, cybercriminals, and drug dealers,” Scholtes claimed, adding there were also concerns about possible espionage via the app.
According to the report, last September Amsterdam city councilor Fatihya Abdi called for a national ban of the platform, claiming that young people were being recruited via the app to commit crimes across the country.
The Ministry of the Interior of the Netherlands has a list of the “most risky” apps that should not be installed on work phones, BNR wrote.
Telegram, which is reportedly used by nearly two million people in the Netherlands, is the largest app to be banned since the country’s government prohibited use of the Chinese-owned short-video platform TikTok on work phones last year.
Telegram is the most used messaging app in Russia and has been also gaining popularity in the rest of the world in recent years, especially after Meta changed the privacy settings of WhatsApp.
Like WhatsApp or Messenger, Telegram allows users to send private and group messages. Unlike its American competitors, however, it also allows users to set up channels to disseminate news and updates to followers.
Telegram’s Russian-born owner, Pavel Durov, has insisted that he respects the rights of Telegram users to privacy and freedom of expression. In an interview in April with American journalist Tucker Carlson, Durov said that he had refused requests to share user data with the US government or to build so-called surveillance “backdoors” into the platform.
In July, Durov announced that Telegram had reached 950 million monthly active users and continues to grow rapidly. Durov, who first founded VK, Russia’s answer to Facebook, sold his stake in VK and left Russia in 2014 due to disagreements with the government. He lived in several countries while looking for the best place from which to run Telegram and ultimately settled in Dubai.
EU officials have been seeking to regulate Telegram and are reportedly considering classifying the app as a “very large online platform.” This would open the privacy-focused messaging app up to stringent EU censorship rules.