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Proton Mail suspended journalist accounts at request of cybersecurity agency

theintercept.com

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Re: Proton Mail suspended journalist accounts at request of cybersecurity agency

#11

Post by gruez »

guywithahat wrote: post #7
SilverElfin wrote: post #3

I thought Proton was a confidentiality / privacy oriented thing. How do they even know who owns the accounts?

You can disable an account without knowing who owns it, although they do have credit card/payment information now, and I don't think new accounts get encryption services unless they pay. That said, if your inbox is encrypted, protonmail does so on the client side with a second password. They can maybe delete the account, but proton mail doesn't know what the encrypted data is. What happens to new emails sent to a dis…

>and I don't think new accounts get encryption services unless they pay.

source? Their compare plans page specifically lists "End-to-end encryption" as a feature for their free plan.

https://proton.me/mail/pricing#compare-plans

Re: Proton Mail suspended journalist accounts at request of cybersecurity agency

#13

Post by mr90210 »

SilverElfin wrote: post #3

I thought Proton was a confidentiality / privacy oriented thing. How do they even know who owns the accounts?

They all are until they get threatened.

Soon or later we will default to analog means. It’s not looking good.

Re: Proton Mail suspended journalist accounts at request of cybersecurity agency

#17

Post by j-bos »

fivefives55555 wrote: post #9

I've been following this on X/Twitter and I think one of the most egregious things that's important to point out is that folks from Phrack reached out to Proton in private multiple times, and Proton ghosted them. Proton only engaged with them and then reinstated the accounts after Phrack went public and their X/Twitter post went viral. It also looks like one of the writers filed an appeal with Proton and Proton denie…

> Phrack reached out to Proton in private multiple times, and Proton ghosted them.

According to Proton's response in the linked reddit post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45227356

They say: "Regarding Phrack’s claim on contacting our legal team 8 times: this is not true. We have only received two emails to our legal team inbox, last one on Sep 6 with a 48-hour deadline. This is unrealistic for a company the size of Proton, especially since the message was sent to our legal team inbox on a Saturday, rather than through the proper customer support channels."

Re: Proton Mail suspended journalist accounts at request of cybersecurity agency

#18

Post by nsagent »

I've need a paying subscriber to Proton since 2018, but I recently canceled my subscription (which ends in November). I just got fed up with the constant bugginess and jankiness of their offerings.

Any suggestions for mail hosting and VPN? I hear good things about Fastmail and mailbox.org (I see they very recently rebranded to just mailbox and revamped their offering).

Also, I've been a heavy user of the SimpleLogin alias service. Any suggestions for easily porting all those accounts to a new provider? Manually changing each and every account to a new email seems painful.

Re: Proton Mail suspended journalist accounts at request of cybersecurity agency

#19

Post by antonymoose »

PSA: Proton deletes “unused” accounts after one year, and defines unused in some opaque sense where receiving but not sending emails is “unused” so I’m in a nasty position of my iCloud account being unrecoverable. Going to have to spend nontrivial time off boarding my account.

Re: Proton Mail suspended journalist accounts at request of cybersecurity agency

#20

Post by HeatrayEnjoyer »

Sunspark wrote: post #10
guywithahat wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can disable an account without knowing who owns it, although they do have credit card/payment information now, and I don't think new accounts get encryption services unless they pay. That said, if your inbox is encrypted, protonmail does so on the client side with a second password. They can maybe delete the account, but proton mail doesn't know what the encrypted data is. What happens to new emails sent to a dis…

You are trusting them. They control the client, how the keys are created/stored, etc. Javascript, etc. If they were to suddenly turn one day, they could. This is the weakness of cloud services.

Or just use an open source email client.

I would expect their own apps to be open source, are they not?

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