Baku, Azerbaijan, Sept. 17
By Umid Niayesh - Trend:
The popular mobile social network application, Telegram has rejected the Islamic Republic's claim on hosting some part of the application's data in Iran.
All Telegram data for Iranian users is and will be hosted in Amsterdam, The Netherlands, the official Twitter account of Telegram announced.
Earlier Mohammad Hassan Entezari, secretary of Iran 's Supreme Council of Cyberspace said that 30 percent of the Iranian users' data of the application is hosted inside the country and the rest outside.
The statement raised concerns among Iranian users of Telegram about possible access of the country's security entities to their private data. However Telegram called the claim completely false.
Currently, some 13 million Iranians use Telegram, according to the Islamic Republic's communications and information technology ministry.
Millions of Iranians use foreign mobile social network applications such as Telegram and WhatsApp. The most popular domestic communication application, BisPhone has almost 800,000 users.
Unofficial statistics suggest that at least 4.5 to 5 million Iranian citizens use WhatsApp mobile social networks application.
Iran's Culture Minister Ali Jannati earlier said that 9.5 million Iranians use the social app Viber and 4 to 4.5 million use Facebook.
It should be noted that several of world's most popular networks, such as Twitter and Facebook are banned in Iran, while users are still able to access them via proxies. A proxy allows bypassing 'gates' meant to block certain sites.
Edited by CN
Follow the author on Twitter: @UmidNiayesh