Pavel Durov, founder and CEO of the encrypted messaging app Telegram, recently revealed that he has ditched his smartphone. “I don’t use a phone. I haven’t used a phone for a year almost” Durov said in an interview for The Tucker Carlson Show. “I don’t carry a phone with me because I find it extremely distracting. I find [it] also potentially harming my privacy. And I also just… don’t think it’s a necessary device for me to have when I want to focus on something.”
This is truly an astonishing statement coming from someone who is such a key figure in the tech world. While Durov himself perhaps does not have quite as much household name recognition as Mark Zuckerberg or Elon Musk, his app Telegram certainly is VERY well known, with over 1 billion active users worldwide. One would expect someone that big in tech to have all the latest/greatest devices on him 24/7.
While Durov admits he does own a smartphone, he only uses it for app testing. “I didn’t have a SIM card in the phone. I just use it to test Telegram, the app, because we have constant product updates. I have to test it like at least twice a week, but I’m not a user of a phone.”
Security and privacy are among Durov’s main concerns. As Durov said, “I think the biggest risk for personal privacy is the ability of any state actor to penetrate the device of the person, the mobile device, for example, because there are so-called zero-day vulnerabilities on iOS or Android phones … that the governments sometimes know about and the secret agencies know about and they can exploit them, but everybody else doesn’t know. And they can’t defend themselves from them.”
Of course, security is not the only reason to ditch the smartphone — Durov also addresses the importance of real-world interactions. When interacting with his team, for example, “I would rather use my laptop or my iPad and put together some notes … I wouldn’t want to just open my phone and disappear there consuming short form content. And that’s why I don’t use a phone.”
If the CEO of the 2nd biggest messaging app in the world doesn’t use a smartphone, maybe we all should take notice.