Old Zuckerberg Chat Resurfaces, Reigniting Privacy Debate

Telegram founder and CEO Pavel Durov has reignited debate over data privacy by resharing a screenshot of an old chat message attributed to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

The message, which dates back to 2004 when Zuckerberg was a Harvard student and Facebook was in its earliest stages, appears to show him joking about collecting personal information from users and mocking the trust placed in him.

Although the chat has circulated online for years, Durov brought renewed attention to it by linking the message to modern concerns about Meta’s handling of user data. In his post, Durov argued that while the original exchange involved a limited number of people, today similar practices affect billions of users across Meta-owned platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp.

Durov’s criticism focused particularly on WhatsApp’s privacy claims. While WhatsApp states that messages are protected by end-to-end encryption — meaning only the sender and recipient can read them — critics have long argued that Meta can still collect extensive metadata, including communication patterns and user behavior.

The reappearance of the text has fueled renewed scrutiny of large technology companies and the gap between public privacy assurances and the realities of data collection at scale.