It might be an unpopular opinion but I am in principle OK. However, it would be really great if telegram would automatically report any of such requests after an embargo period of e.g. even 6 month to the subject of the request. Further they should always require a court order, which should be straight forward in most countries. The worst thing about government actors is their intransparency. Even in Germany we had Nazi police officers requesting personal addresses of human rights attorneys. All this only gets noticed pretty much by chance.
The difference is they don't hand over the data of all their users but of specific ones, just like every other entity does if you have a warrant for that user.
The issue becomes far more pronounced if the state is able to determine your identity through your phone number, which in Germany is usually tightly coupled to your identity.
I don't need 3rd rate officials being in a position to judge my communication for some badly defined security benefit that allegedly would manifest for the whole society.
Plus Germany still has quite a bad record here. After WWII it didn't stop to invent new forms of totalitarianism through surveillance.
I don't think government access to such accounts is particularly constructive. Be that as it may, there is a simple form of protection and that is not storing any phone numbers, which gladly most online services still don't do.
I cringe if some services ask me for a number for "security". Whose security would that be exactly? Certainly not mine, this is exposing unnecessary data.
This is why Signal or Telegram are no secure options for me because they simply are not secure. And this isn't some exotic security scenario, it is the exact issue many people already complained about for years.
The next step for telegram is pretty obvious. Stop collecting information about your users if you don't want to be forced to hand it over when given a valid government warrant. Of course that means they actually have to roll out E2E encryption by default so they probably won't do that.
Governments will just force user tracking and collecting data, and if you won't comply, you'll go to jail. If you're a legal business, there's no way to avoid three letter agencies messing with you and your users.
