this sucks, but I also can’t blame them too much
most people seem to have an unrealistic expectation for protonmail to function as an underground criminal organisation, providing email services to drug dealers, and wiping their asses with subpoenas, which runs contrary to their goal of providing user-friendly private email to as many people as possible, not only the ones that would go to extremes no matter what
The CEO of ProtonMail previously: https://threatpost.com/protonvpn-ceo-blasts-apple-myanmar/165022, and https://protonmail.com/blog/protesters-free-speech is pretty hypocritical now, but you can spot a pattern, that he only opposes the systems and governments the West opposes too. In that way, I consider him to be nothing more, than the willing tool of propaganda, for his own enrichement.
from their comment on reddit, it seems there wasn’t much they could do
In this case, Proton received a legally binding order from the Swiss Federal Department of Justice which we are obligated to comply with. There was no possibility to appeal or fight this particular request because an act contrary to Swiss law did in fact take place (and this was also the final determination of the Federal Department of Justice which does a legal review of each case).
what did you expect them to do?
Clearly state the difference between ProtonMail and ProtonVPN differences in the kinds of data that are being collected. The issue is not compliance, the issue is that they’d provide enough data for it to be useful, defeating the purpose of their privacy marketing.
Try a little harder at least. Just the surrounding publicity even for a lost court-case would have been a net benefit.
Their explanation sound like “we couldn’t do anything against this legal over-reach because the entity that did the legal over-reach said that it was all legal and fine”, which when you think about it longer than 3 seconds is true for each and every case where the authorities request something. An internal “review” by a biased party involved in one side is not the same as a real test in court.
from my understanding it’s a legally binding order that they legally literally can’t appeal
Yes that is what they claim, but in most jurisdictions there is no such thing as an unappealable order (only after it has been already once dismissed in court can the judge rule-out further appeals) and there usually is some official legal recourse despite what the authorities like to claim in their own self-interest.
If there was a similar precedence case, which would have made chances in court extremely low, then they could have said so. But they basically admit by omission that they didn’t even try.
it’s not helpful to compare to the way this works in the rest of the world, because it doesn’t determine what’s exactly true in this case; I’m not an expert on swiss law by any means (lol), but I suspect that protonmail does have a lawyer proficient in swiss law, probably more than one, and i really doubt that what they tell is a lie
if we are operating off of the assumption that they are bad guys only interested in money (which i personally don’t think is the case), they would very much care about pr, and to not fight the case and then lie about it is pretty much the worst pr they think of
and if even if they did this foolish move, wouldn’t there be at least a few people who understand swiss law who would point out that this is a lie?
I didn’t say it is blatant lie, but probably one by omission. There probably really isn’t a strait-forward way to appeal it (legal authorities like to do that in cases they know they would get a lot of appeals otherwise), but what do you think would have happened if they had not complied? Usually that then forces a court case, during which they can lay out their reasons why they think this was legal over-reach on the side of the Swiss authorities and a judge would be forced to make a ruling on that.
He’s a business man trying to run a business, while also following the law. The line will always be drawn at keeping the business going.
As always, comments get piled on while nobody understands the real issue. I expect far better quality than Reddit here.
- ProtonMail has been exposed multiple times for not being activist friendly.
- You are not supposed to use emails for high threat models without referring to this guide https://digdeeper.neocities.org/ghost/email.html
- This is not a question of ProtonMail vs Gmail.
- This is not a question of self hosting or not.
- This is not a question about legalese crap, but what ProtonMail really stands for.
- Everybody needs to understand the difference between privacy, security and anonymity and how this is achieved.
Ey, thanks for the comment. Really good one. Really useful resource
I expect far better quality than Reddit here.
Yes, but we need people like you to provide that content. In short, don’t expect other people to be that change; that change starts with you. Thanks for the resources and level-headed opinion. People in general who use any service provider for “privacy reasons” should only do so to keep the issuing company from scanning their messages and selling data about you. Email itself, regardless of how it’s set up, will fail you if you’re thinking it will keep you hidden.
My privacy community c/privatelife is in the sidebar of c/privacy ;)
Besides, I have provided massive amounts of content in the form of comments on Lemmy, on this year old account of mine. I am also on Reddit, where my r/privatelife exists.
This is not a question of ProtonMail vs Gmail.
What do you mean by this?
Presumably for a lot of people that is going to be the main, perhaps only, question.And that is the problem here. ProtonMail is not going to keep you safe. Gmail is not going to keep you safe. Who is going to keep you safe? Your OPSEC. You possessing the knowledge about how email works, and how privacy, security and anonymity work, and how you will control these elements. These are the things that should be debated, not X vs Y email brand.
That is a big Oof. But yeah, PM is far from being perfect. I use it bc:
- Better tan Gmail & etc
- Unable to selfhost email :c
But one thing, how secure will be to selfhost your own eMail? If I selfhost one, which will be the most secure & private teaks that I can apply?
Have you considered disroot mail? It’s what I use and it’s awesome
If you selfhost the email on your own hardware, then the IP will be apparent to anyone. If you selfhost it on somebody else’s hardware, they can be legally compelled to log your IP as happened here with proton. But if you aren’t committing any crimes, selfhosting either way is probably more private than proton, since you are more confident in what software is running, while with proton you have to trust that the frontend being served is actually the e2e encrypted one
I personally use migadu. Don’t know about how private it is but I is cheap and allows for loads of addresses and domains.
I red that reverse DNS is needed to not be considered as spammer, but my internet provider does not allow it yet. So in the meantime, I use Protonmail because of the first point you stated.
Not a huge surprise, but the apparent total lack of legal resistance by ProtonMail to what looks like legal over-reach by the French & Swiss authorities is going to be a PR disaster for them, and rightly so.
Yeah, but this helps exposing that you can’t trust nobody.
“Over-reach” in what way?
I did not look very deeply into that, but from what I read it was the French authorities that utilized anti-terror laws against some climate protesters that were squatting buildings in Paris, and because “terrorism” is a crime in Switzerland too the Swiss authorities just complied with the French request without questioning if the application of such laws was appropriate in relation to the “crime” committed.
IANAL, but if ProtonMail had legally challenged this there would have been at least a chance that a judge would have ruled in favor of ProtonMail because of this unjustified use of anti-terror legislation.
I wish they would go into more detail why this specific case could not be legally challenged. Their response sounds good otherwise (especially also that they recommend Tor for such cases), but this deliberate omission makes me think that the case was maybe not so clear cut after all.
I am assuming they were not using proton VPN?
Even if their were, proton company would have been legally required to trace their connection through proton VPN. Using tor would have been the better move.EDIT: apparently swiss laws exempt VPNs from these sorts of legal issues.
Would they? According to their recent blogpost about the controversy:
- Under current Swiss law, email and VPN are treated differently, and ProtonVPN cannot be compelled to log user data.
…just pasting their claims. If this is true, using a Swiss based, no-logging VPN would be enough to avoid your IP being revealed
That’s very interesting. I’ve updated my coment.
One shouldn’t expect otherwise. See also https://web.archive.org/web/20210719011623/https://privacy-watchdog.io/truth-about-protonmail/.
Fuck I pay for them!
Crazy
I have looked a bit into it. In case anyone is curious, I believe that the authorities found the e-mail in question (jmm18@protonmail.com) here:
https://paris-luttes.info/occupation-d-un-local-du-petit-14575?lang=fr
And/or here:
https://radar.squat.net/fr/event/paris/local-du-h/2021-02-24/ag-publique
Really what is the average person suppose to do to have a private email? I heard Edward Snowden say that email is fundamentally flawed and will never be secure. I’ve thought about hosting my own email server, but even then i need to buy a domain name likely with my own card, buy a VPS with my own card and it traces back to me.
“Private” and “Anonymous” are different things.
You can protect privacy with encryption, and I believe ProtonMail does work for that, but trying to protect anonymity is an entirely different beast. I’m not convienced it’s possible at all in any way that’s reliable (not just email but also even simple web browsing) unless there’s a change in how routing works in the internet, or a new layer is developed (like I2P, but even that’s not really a warranty).
Tor Browser works decently for web browsing. It’s a trade off in convenience, but its anonymity is pretty strong. If you need even stronger security, you can go with Tails or Whonix.
You can create a ProtonMail account over Tor, bur you need to verify it with a phone number or a small payment that you again need to get anonymously. It’s a lot of effort, but it’s possible to operate a ProtonMail account anonymously. Whether you really need this is up to your threat model. Also in this case a simple VPN would have probably been enough.
Yes, Tor is another example of a “new layer” on internet routing (I2P functions the same, you can also use it to access the clearnet if you know an exit node). VPN would be fine if you could trust the provider, but imho that’s just shifting the trust to some other company, more of a patch rather than a proper solution to online anonymity.
Just in case, perhaps one can get away with dynamic DNS sort of pseudo domain, not a full domain, so that you can access services you host at home, without having to know the IP. At any rate, whether pseudo DDNS or full DNS, the IP is fully recognizable.
The advantage of a VPS might be some protection against home blackouts and internet lost every now and then, depending where you live. However, self hosting poses several issues. Isolating your network (firewalls plus kernel hardening), hardening the servers,protect against common attacks such as denial of services, as well as infiltrating the services. All than not to mention dealing with spam and much more.
However, I’m tending towards the idea the we have to self host, now a days. Trusting providers is not wise. Granted email is not secure, neither private, however the same applies to other services. FB is even looking at ways to extract information from whatsapp without decrypting messages… Signal leaks quite some information about its users, and though the advertise themselves about not able to decrypt messages, they can and probably do share all metadata they grab.
I’d really like distributed mechanisms, to take over, and become mainstream, not just decentralized, because then there are no servers to depend upon, and the information is just shared among those whom the information was generated for, no trusting in servers, not even your own.
I like the idea of self hosting email - it just seems to be a total pain however. I’ve done it a few times but the process is so fragmented and I just don’t have the time to dedicate to maintaining it.
Email has not been designed with security in mind. Even if the content is encrypted, email still leaks a lot of metadata, including:
- To, From, Cc, Date and Subject.
Using PGP is not helping since it is a phased out - and obsolete - technology which has a lot of problems:
If you need secure communication a good solution is E2EE which is enabled by default in signal and in element. Ideally, you should use e-mail to receive newsletter, sign in to sites and nothing more.
That being said, the whole situation about ProtonMail is quite overblown. As detailed in their transparency report, and privacy policy they MUST provide account’s information like the IP address if the Swiss criminal investigation requires them. By default, they don’t log the IP of the users.
Now, if this is a real concern for you, then you should not using their service. Otherwise, go for it. ProtonMail is still a valid choice.
Edit: However, it’s important to understand that every time you visit a website, you automatically send a set of features to it , including your IP address. It’s just how internet works. The whole “no log policy” is not something you can verify. You have to fully and blindly trust the provider whether it is located in a 5 Eyes country or in Iceland.
Edit: self hosting a email server it’s actually really, really difficult. It’s not something that a unskilled person could do.
It is just propietary software in the server side and some parts of the client side.
It is also a company.
Just use something like Disroot.org
You can also use Briar.
Disroot.org is not an activist organization, they will do the same thing.
Also, if you need more information about Disroot:
I think there is a common misread here, I never said the issue could not happen, I mean that for helping or supporting this kind of company which runs services over propietary software during and without these issues, it is preferable to support Disroot on it.
Not centric on that part of the news but the simply fact that is just Protonmail.
@Echedenyan@lemmy.ml yes, but there are few caveats with disroot. What is special about companies like Protonmail and the like is that they store encrypted emails on their servers. According to disroot’s privacy policy: “All emails, unless encrypted by the user (with GnuPG/PGP, for example) are stored unencrypted on our servers.”, so in theory there is more data that can be forced to handover. Another concern about disroot is that they don’t have the budget for expensive security audits, their mail server is NextCloud, and their web-mail client is Rainloop web-mail, the later doesn’t seem to be very actively maintained, so how secure is it? I don’t know.
