If these facts convinced you enough that you don’t want to be associated with the company, you should think about deleting your account and ditching it for good. As the Russian Intelligence services are notorious for invading user privacy, this is a big concern for ICQ users.Īs you can see, there are a few controversies surrounding ICQ that raises privacy concerns. This put ICQ’s user privacy and security policy into question. It was said that the Russian government allegedly had access to the private conversations of ICQ users. In May 2018, when the company was under the ownership of, allegations about ICQ cooperating with the Russian Intelligence services came out. ICQ claimed this was done as such alternative clients posed security threats to users and hence were classified as dangerous and malicious. Some of these clients stopped working completely and users got a notification alerting them about the changes that were made.

The company made many changes to its system that caused problems with such third-party clients. But in 2008, when ICQ was under the ownership of AOL, the company pursued a very aggressive policy regarding alternative or third-party ICQ clients. ICQ allowed developers to create their own ICQ clients using their API. Some of these criticisms are totally warranted as they put user privacy into question and some of them are quite unethical which cannot be ignored.

Let us take a look at some of these controversies about the platform which may help you change your mind about ICQ. And many of them may not know about the controversies surrounding the platform. ICQ has about 100 million registered users. Click Here To Ask Our TECH SUPPORT Why you should think about deleting your ICQ account?

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