Pavel Durov Quotes

It is not possible to debate the balance between privacy and security, including the rights and wrongs of intrusive powers, without also understanding the threats.

The right to personal privacy is precious. Without it, we are all potential victims for a prying secret police.

If we give up all our privacy rights, have we become any safer?

Law-abiding citizens value privacy. Terrorists require invisibility. The two are not the same, and they should not be confused.

I think most people accept that it is necessary to have some surveillance in a democratic society. I think most people accept that it's important to have limits and clear safeguards on that.

Our national security requires us to be strong and fearless, but not at the cost of personal privacy.

Have you noticed the people most likely to be up in arms about governments apparently spying on us tend to be the most non-private people you know? The people launching petitions and wailing about Big Brother and data collection are most likely to be the most constant self-presenters.

I thought that the AIVD was there to protect citizens like me.

The people who are worried about privacy have a legitimate worry. But we live in a complex world where you're going to have to have a level of security greater than you did back in the olden days, if you will. And our laws and our interpretation of the Constitution, I think, have to change.

The American people must be willing to give up a degree of personal privacy in exchange for safety and security.

Privacy isn't negotiable. It's the right of every American.

I might have lived in England for the last several years, but I'm still an American citizen and I have not given up my right to privacy.

Secret government programs that pry into people's private affairs are bound up with ideas about secrecy and privacy that arose during the process by which the mysterious became secular.

As all of our lives become digital, the logic of encryption is all of our lives will be covered by strong encryption, and therefore all of our lives - including the lives of criminals and terrorists and spies - will be in a place that is utterly unavailable to court-ordered process. And that, I think, to a democracy should be very, very concerning.

Is privacy about government security agents decrypting your e-mail and then kicking down the front door with their jackboots? Or is it about telemarketers interrupting your supper with cold calls? It depends. Mainly, of course, it depends on whether you live in a totalitarian or a free society.

I have nothing to hide!

The issue of wiretapping raises the issue of the balance between human liberty and the requirements of national security. I would say that the weight should be on the side of human liberty and that if human liberty is ever to be infringed, the demonstration on the national security side must be overwhelming.

We encounter the dilemma of freedom versus authority in all sorts of places but probably nowhere more frequently than in the area of Big Brother's ongoing efforts to protect us from ourselves – efforts that many people view as an invasion of their privacy or as infringement upon their God-given right to be stupid (though they don't usually put it that way).

We don’t have to choose between preserving privacy and preventing terrorism. We do have to decide how much oversight and accountability there should be when the government conducts surveillance on its citizens.

Many of our customers have serious concerns about government surveillance of the Internet. We share their concerns.

A democratic country has zero tolerance for all illegal monitoring operations.

In our view, the current storage by the government of bulk meta-data creates potential risks to public trust, personal privacy, and civil liberty.

Legal and bureaucratic impediments to surveillance should be removed.

The question is how much of your privacy and your convenience and your commerce do you want your nation's security apparatus to squeeze in order to keep you safe? And it is a choice that we have to make.

There is no such thing as absolute privacy in America.