Pavel Durov

At least among the popular messaging apps, you say WhatsApp, Signal, iMessage, none of them have reproducible builds on both iOS and Android.

None of them had, at least at the same level, put so much effort into making sure that the algorithms that you use in order to encrypt data are not algorithms that have been handed to you by some agency in order to create a honeypot.

At least from what I know about our competitors, I don't think they went through the same process.

It does make it more secure because if Snowden's relations taught us anything, it's that very often open source tools, modules, libraries that are used by everybody ended up having certain flaws and security issues.

that make your software vulnerable.

It's also a way to make sure you're doing things the most efficient way possible.

But it's extremely difficult to do that.

You really have to have exceptional talent in your team to achieve this level of thoroughness, to go to a low level of coding that allows you to recreate from scratch database engines, web servers, entire programming languages.

because the programming language we use on the back end to develop the API for the client apps is also entirely built by our team.

Well, I wouldn't say we completely independent from that.

We use Linux on the back end.

There's no way of avoiding it for us at the moment.

But for the most part, we are much more self-reliant than most other apps.

Well, the main lesson is not everything what it seems.

And you would discover, and this is something I found quite shocking at the time, that a lot of people who you thought were security and cryptography experts ended up being agents of the NSA in one way or the other, promoting flawed encryption standards.

you wouldn't end up discovering that your government that was supposed to be limited in how it can surveil its people actually doesn't consider itself that limited.

And that was very valuable for the world to understand.

I guess it also can be a lesson demonstrated that we humans don't get their balance right.

And it responded, but it overreacted.

It ended up in deroding certain basic rights and freedoms, including the right to privacy, because the government always wants to increase its powers, and the government always tries to do it at the expense of citizens.