As many continue to flock to Telegram, abandoning WhatsApp due to concerns about its privacy policy, social media law specialist Emma Sadlier has warned about a Telegram feature which easily exposes children to pornography.

This comes after Sadlier discovered that turning on "location" can expose children to inappropriate material such as porn.

She warned parents whose children have downloaded Telegram to ensure that the location is turned off and cannot be turned back on to avoid exposure to such material.

“Go into settings and turn off locations — but the problem with kids is that they can turn it back on when you are not watching,” she said. “So you need to make sure that there is a parental control function that either stops them from turning the location on and off, or if you decided they mustn’t be on Telegram, to ban them from the platform,” she said.

Sadlier said the app has a feature which exposes children to pornography.

“I got an enquiry about it this morning and within literally a minute of looking at it, I was getting the most crazy porn, it was really hectic,” she said.

“If you go to your Telegram, and you click the people nearby, there are groups nearby and you click any of those groups nearby, there is just crazy porn in all of them. That function gets disabled if you turn off your location features.”

How to access the location feature on your phone:

• go into "settings" on your phone;
• go to "privacy and location";
• in "permission manager" you are allowed to turn off your location settings for each app.

TimesLIVE