Translated material
ICQ will stop supporting third-party clients. Users fear for the security of personal data
ICQ messenger will no longer support old versions of the official application from December 28 and unofficial clients, according to TJournal , this was not publicly announced, users received messages about this from the ICQ Official account.
Mail.ru Group, which is the owner of the messenger, confirmed to the publication that the protocol was disabled "which has not been supported for a long time and which does not have many new good features", including calls, audio messages, stickers and group chats.
According to TJ, users on social networks wrote that the UIN (user identifier) in the official version of the messenger is tied to a phone number, which makes it impossible to create multiple accounts in it. Also, users, the newspaper notes, expressed concerns regarding the security of personal data.
Representatives of ICQ told TJ that a UIN would be enough to enter the application, but at the same time emphasized that in May 2019, the rules for identifying messenger users by phone number will come into force, effectively prohibiting their anonymous use.
A user of the Habra website reported that the owners of third-party ICQ clients were banned from sending messages, and every time they tried to perform this action, they were told: “Maybe the attackers managed to gain access to your account. Please follow the link to unblock, which asked to link an account to a phone number.
ICQ appeared in 1996 and became popular in the early 2000s. Over time, including due to the emergence of new messengers, it has partially lost its relevance, but they still continue to use it.
In May, Novaya Gazeta analyzed all the verdicts of Russian courts, the texts of which contain the abbreviation SITKS (“Removal of information from technical communication channels”), among them there were 34 cases, during the investigation of which police officers read instant messengers. In 21 out of 34 cases, information was removed after the device was removed; in 6 cases, it turned out to be impossible to determine whether the seizure or reading happened earlier, and in 7 analyzed cases, it became known about the “online removal” of information from communication channels. At the same time, in six out of seven cases, it was about reading ICQ by the special services.
The press service of the messenger said that "information about such cooperation with the special services, and even more so about providing online access to correspondence, is not true."