I understand that no person or company is above the law and that the user should have used a VPN or Tor but I find it funny that Proton promotes itself as a private provider which does not give out user information when it can log any type of user information and give it to the authorities, it is certainly not a private service.
Proton Mail discloses user data leading to arrest in Spain
251–260 of 283 posts
Re: Proton Mail discloses user data leading to arrest in Spain
#252Earlier quoted context omitted.
>Democratic freedoms, in the United States at least, protect people from UNREASONABLE search and seizure. You're conflating what's written in the law and the sad reality of how a lot of that is simply ignored by law enforcement, while they are standing on your neck, searching your car.
Pretty fun, that precisely for you "standing on neck, searching car" is REASONABLE search and seizure, not for him. Pretty expected.
Standing on anyone's neck, while searching their car without a warrant or probable cause is a problem, for everyone.
I'm not even sure why I have to clarify this, but ok!
Re: Proton Mail discloses user data leading to arrest in Spain
#253Earlier quoted context omitted.
Proton Mail can give email content, however, it is encrypted and they do not have the encryption keys. Anything that is stored by anyone can be handed over. That information may be useful, may be useless or may be useless now and useful tomorrow when they have the key.
> they do not have the encryption keys. True, but they can trivially obtain them given they control everything in the browser. The question then becomes, does the law allow compelling to that degree? Apple fought back in the San Bruno case, but they’re very well lawyered up
But Swiss law can't make a request like that.
Re: Proton Mail discloses user data leading to arrest in Spain
#254This situation is interesting, but the article mentions using a VPN for example, and also the recovery email. What if my recovery email is to another proton mail account? What if my VPN used is Proton VPN?
A recovery email is optional, and Proton VPN is no logs.
Re: Proton Mail discloses user data leading to arrest in Spain
#255It seems there is some mental conflict going in readers between the reality of what ProtonMail does for its customers and their expectations of what kinds of protections a legitimate business can provide. Both ProtonMail and Apple will challenge subpoenas when they believe they are not valid, however neither company has the final say in the matter and can be compelled to provide access to data that they reasonably ha…
I don't think this is solely the issue that users don't understand that the companies are obliged to provide the data requested by the authorities. The whole controversy surrounding Proton started when they marketed themselves as "secure and private email", promising they would NEVER give away their users' data, until they did. I had a similar discussion with my friends today about this topic and the issue I have wit…
But didn't this prove the opposite? An optional email recovery.. I think other companies would have been obligated to provide far more information, including emails etc..
Re: Proton Mail discloses user data leading to arrest in Spain
#256I use Proton to protect myself from Google, Microsoft, advertisements, tracking, terrible, slow, “too much padding everywhere” UI, my emails/data being sold to 3rd parties, etc. I’m not worried about Proton cooperating with law enforcement agencies to catch criminals. However. What if say, russia/nk/china wants to catch somebody some journalist for speaking truth about their regimes? Or, like say, Jason Bourne exposi…
But requests have to meet Swiss standards, which makes all the difference.
Re: Proton Mail discloses user data leading to arrest in Spain
#257Earlier quoted context omitted.
Please quote from the linked article where it says that (it doesn't).
Are you sure? > The core of the controversy stems from Proton Mail providing the Spanish police with the recovery email address associated with the Proton Mail account of an individual using the pseudonym ‘Xuxo Rondinaire.’
The recovery email is optional, the rest of the information was provided by Apple.
Re: Proton Mail discloses user data leading to arrest in Spain
#258Earlier quoted context omitted.
Doh. I read it as "a company can tell the country it operates from, Norway." I thought "Huh? Why would an Icelandic company operate from Norway?" Well, I thought, I suppose there must be quite a few. But why's he mentioning it here? Thanks for inadvertently clarifying.
>Doh. I read it as "a company can tell the country it operates from, Norway." Really Norway? Are you guys stupid?
NO is the country abbreviation for Norway.
In answer to your question: firstly I am not "guys", I'm one person; and secondly, yes, I feel pretty stupid.
Re: Proton Mail discloses user data leading to arrest in Spain
#259Earlier quoted context omitted.
If your threat model is "utilize secure email/VPN/tor to evade organizations on the spectrum of [law enforcement...intelligence services]" you are not a typical user even of those services and saying that it's on you to understand all the corner cases and tricks to avoid persecution, prosecution, execution, etc. seems pretty reasonable.
I wouldn’t call it reasonable. If you’re trying to evade LE because it’s illegal to be gay in your country, and you get caught because you’d listed an Apple address in your ProtonMail account - can’t we design better products to make this less likely?
Who gets to decide which specific sorts of evasion of law enforcement are acceptable?
Should we consult your personal moral preferences for that, as applied to each of the 200+ countries on the planet? Why do your preferences overrule those jurisdictions' decisions?
Re: Proton Mail discloses user data leading to arrest in Spain
#260It seems there is some mental conflict going in readers between the reality of what ProtonMail does for its customers and their expectations of what kinds of protections a legitimate business can provide. Both ProtonMail and Apple will challenge subpoenas when they believe they are not valid, however neither company has the final say in the matter and can be compelled to provide access to data that they reasonably ha…
I don't think this is solely the issue that users don't understand that the companies are obliged to provide the data requested by the authorities. The whole controversy surrounding Proton started when they marketed themselves as "secure and private email", promising they would NEVER give away their users' data, until they did. I had a similar discussion with my friends today about this topic and the issue I have wit…
Tangent: Been looking to switch email providers for a while, and hadn’t heard of Tuta. Looked good enough I just went ahead and signed up… only to find out apparently they provide no real data portability whatsoever.
The only option for getting your email _out_ of their systems is to select small batches of them one-by-one in their app and export them.
There have been many requests for something similar to Proton’s bridge functionality that haven’t gone anywhere. A more useful export function has been near the top of their public roadmap[0] for half a decade now it looks like.[1]
Guess I’ll go find out what their refund process is like.
Don’t mind me. Just yelling into the void.
[0] https://tuta.com/roadmap/ [1] https://github.com/tutao/tutanota/issues/1292