Do you remember when messenger apps were not common, and almost everyone chatted with each other by phone or SMS? What about the days when you did not have cellphones and had to call a friend’s house and ask their parents to put them on the phone?
Messenger apps have made our lives so much easier. Now, you can just send text or voice messages via various messenger apps to plan a weekend trip with your friend or even spontaneously ask your boyfriend or girlfriend to have dinner together. Apart from just sending messages, you can call them. In the case of KakaoTalk and WeChat, you can also enjoy many other services and features, such as sending a gift to your friends, shopping, and paying. However, the more messenger apps have flourished, the more privacy and data security concerns have occurred. Many messenger apps, including WhatsApp, use end-to-end encryption (E2EE) to deal with those issues. E2EE is a technological method for secure communication where only the sender and recipient(s) of a particular message hold a unique key to unlock and read it. Therefore, even the app cannot see what is being communicated (WhatsApp Help Center, 2021).
The app I will talk about in this post is Telegram. Telegram was first launched in 2013 by Nikolai and Pavel Durov after VK, the Russian social media that they founded, was taken over by the government (Agence France-Presse, 2014). Due to this background, Telegram has a strong shield against censorship. Also, the app has a ‘secret chats’ function, which uses E2EE and supports self-destructing messages. These characteristics have made the data security of the app powerful. Still, on the other hand, it has been a massive platform for various illegal activities worldwide. Thus, negative network effects have been occurring.
One of the examples of negative network effects on the powerfully secured platform is the Nth Room case. It is a criminal case in Korea from 2018 to March 2020, where sexually exploitive videos were spread via several messenger platforms, primarily via Telegram. There were many different chat rooms with varying themes of sexually exploitative videos. The most well-known room is Baksa-room, made by Joobin Cho (Telegram user name: Baksa). Baksa collected sexually exploitative pictures and videos by forcing and threatening teenage girls and women who were in their 20s or 30s, and he posted them on the chat room. To enter the room, users had to pay a certain amount of money to Baksa with cryptocurrencies. There were also rooms whose entry fees were more expensive than Baksa-room, where users could see more violent content. As Baksa was arrested on the 17th of March, 2020, some who also spread or sold sexually exploitive content on Telegram got arrested. The so-called Nth Room Prevention Law has been enforced in response to the case. Still, the law’s critical limitation is that it cannot be the solution for similar criminal activities since it can easily become excessive regulation with monitoring. Moreover, according to Article 18 of the constitution of the Republic of Korea, “the privacy of correspondence of no citizen shall be infringed.” This is a huge dilemma.
Apart from online (child) sex crime, many other types of criminal actions, such as selling drugs or stolen data, keep happening on highly-secured messenger platforms, and this is creating negative network effects, which have a high potential to attract more and more people from both the supply side and the demand side.
Unfortunately, there is no silver bullet to prevent cybercrime, especially on data-secured messenger platforms. And, in my opinion, since it is snowballing with strong network effects and the level of data security of platforms is getting higher, it will become much more challenging to detect criminal activities on the platforms than before.
Are there any other examples you know of or similar cases in your home country? If so, please feel free to share them in the comments.
Moreover, a Netflix documentary named ‘Cyber Hell’ is about the Nth Room case. I highly recommend the documentary if you are interested in more information about the case.
References
Agence France-Presse (2014) Pavel Durov left Russia after being pushed out. Available at: https://web.archive.org/web/20140424024304/http://articles.economictimes.indiatimes.com/2014-04-22/news/49318882_1_social-network-vkontakte-pavel-durov-founder-mark-zuckerberg (Accessed: 7 October 2022).
Bahar, Z. (2022) Is Telegram safe? Available at: https://nordvpn.com/blog/is-telegram-safe/ (Accessed: 7 October 2022).
Murphy, H. (2021) Montage of a smartphone and Telegram logos. Available at: https://www.ft.com/content/cc3e3854-5f76-4422-a970-9010c3bc732b (Accessed: 8 October 2022).
WhatsApp Help Center (2021) About end-to-end encryption. Available at: https://faq.whatsapp.com/791574747982248/?locale=en_US (Accessed: 7 October 2022).
