Telegram bot 'Eye of God', which is capable of revealing personal information, has suspended operations after raids on developers in Russia.
According to the publication 'Mediazona', the searches were conducted as part of a criminal case under Article 272.1 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation 'Illegal use and transfer, collection and storage of computer information containing personal data'.
"The entire bot team is indeed being pursued. Anyone they can reach", a source from the publication said.
At the same time, the source reports that the programmer Yevgeny Antipov, who calls himself the founder of the service, is not in Russia. For his part, Antipov himself stated that he has not left the country and knows nothing about the searches.
"We don't have a team. It's exclusively [me] and I haven't been raided. I think this is about someone else", he said.
It is noted that on 27 February, Antipov published a post in which he announced 'minor technical changes' to the service.
"No global changes are planned, these are just cosmetic tweaks. In some places, the output will become slightly less voluminous thanks to AI", he wrote.
To remind you, in September 2023, it became known that a Telegram bot was actively disclosing information about citizens of Kazakhstan, including their exact places of residence, links to social networks and messengers, dates of birth, full names, photographs, Individual Identification Numbers (IIN) and information about their cars. It was reported that to obtain this data, it was enough to send the bot the phone number of the person of interest.
It should be noted that the leak of personal data affected not only ordinary residents of Kazakhstan, but also high-ranking civil servants. At the time, journalists used the bot to obtain personal information about former Minister of Digitalisation Bagdat Mussin, whose department is responsible, among other things, for ensuring the data security of its supervised services.