To populate the ‘People’ box at the top of the Search section, Telegram calculates which of your chat partners you are likelier to message frequently. We calculate a similar rating for inline bots – thanks to that, the app can suggest you the bots you use frequently whenever you open the attachment menu (or start a new message with “@”).
To remove this data from Telegram servers and stop Telegram from collecting it, make sure you have either Telegram 4.8.3 for iOS or Telegram 4.8.10 for Android. Go to Settings > Privacy & Security and disable ‘Suggest Frequent Contacts’ to stop calculating ratings for contacts and inline bots, and delete all relevant data.
If you have other questions about data privacy, please use our @GDPRbot to contact Telegram's Data Protection Officer.