How to stop Telegram training AI on your data
What the policy itself says, plan by plan. Where Telegram publishes the steps, they're here in its own words, read from an archived copy of the page that gives them. Where it doesn't, this page says so instead of inventing a menu path.
All accounts
Telegram's privacy policy contains no form of the word "train", no "machine learning" and no "artificial intelligence" anywhere in the capture, on 13 Aug and again on 24 Aug. For a messaging service that describes its data handling in some detail, the complete absence of AI-training language is itself the finding: there is no permission to train stated, and no commitment not to. One thing did change on 24 Aug, and it bears on this. The policy used to say "Unlike other services, we don't use your data for ad targeting or other commercial purposes" — a sweeping assurance a reader could reasonably have read as covering model training. Both no-ads sentences survive, but narrowed, and not identically. The principles section now says "We don't use the contents of any of your chats or contact lists to show you ads"; the no-ads section says "we don't use the contents of your private chats or contacts lists for ad targeting or other commercial purposes". The second is the one that reached beyond advertising, and it now reaches only private chats: the contents of public groups and channels have left the "other commercial purposes" assurance, and everything that is not chat content at all — usage metadata, device information — was never inside it. A new section serves ads on the basis of Telegram's "legitimate interest". Nothing was added about training either way. (This entry previously rendered both narrowings as a single phrase, "the contents of your chats or contact lists", which neither sentence says; corrected 1 September 2026.)
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