Amid growing concerns about WhatsApp’s new privacy policy and its sharing of user data with its parent company Facebook, apps such as Telegram and Signal saw a significant surge in new users joining their platform. Messaging app Telegram has surpassed 500 million monthly active users.
Around 25 million new users joined Telegram in the last 72 hours, the company said, noting that 38% of the new users were from Asia, 27 percent from Europe, 21 percent from Latin America, and 8 percent from the Middle East and North Africa.
Telegram reports 25 million new users over the last 72 hours amid WhatsApp’s privacy policy controversy
The flood of new users joining the messaging app comes after Whatsapp made users agree to its new privacy policy, which includes terms that allow the platform to share private user data with Facebook.
In a recent blog post, Durov said, “This is a significant increase compared to last year, when 1.5M new users signed up every day. We’ve had surges of downloads before, throughout our 7-year history of protecting user privacy. But this time is different.”
“People no longer want to exchange their privacy for free services. They no longer want to be held hostage by tech monopolies that seem to think they can get away with anything as long as their apps have a critical mass of users,” he added.
Despite the significant increase in Telegram’s user base, however, the number is not that impressive when in comparison to WhatsApp, which is estimated to have as many as 2 billion users worldwide. It will definitely be interesting to see how much WhatsApp’s user base will be impacted by its new policy changes.
Keeping in mind that WhatsApp is the most popular messaging platform – for iOS and Android users – worldwide, the dip in its user base shouldn’t be very significant. Many users and businesses will still continue to use the platform due to the fact that it is accessible and easy to use. Recently, WhatsApp even issued a statement to clear some of the misinformation going around regarding its new policies. 
“We want to be clear that the policy update does not affect the privacy of your messages with friends or family in any way. Instead, this update includes changes related to messaging a business on WhatsApp, which is optional and provides further transparency about how we collect and use data,” reads the FAQ page on the new update.
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