Why Did ProtonMail Vanish from Google Search Results? (2016)
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Having worked at Google’s Search Quality Evaluation team, I can confirm that Google would only manually remove sites from its search results if they violate its webmaster guidelines: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/35769?hl=en
Of course, there can be other issues preventing a site from showing up in the search results (e.g. site migration issues, accidentally locking out Googlebot in robots.txt, ...). In such cases, the best way to raise the issue would be to report it on the webmaster forum, which is frequented both by smart and helpful users and by Googlers working on search quality: https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!forum/webmasters
I'll rag on Google's poor support as much as the next guy, but only when it's warranted. ProtonMail and anyone else that gets delisted / what-have-you is not Google's client and shouldn't expect first-class support for things like this.
http://ec.europa.eu/competition/elojade/isef/case_details.cf...
http://ec.europa.eu/competition/elojade/isef/index.cfm?fusea...
Asking Google to be responsive to any website demanding special treatment for higher search rankings is unreasonable. Best practices are published and tools are available. It's hard to see monopolistic abuse there.
The only difference is that Gmail (and other Google products) are listed when you, shockingly, go to google.com. Are you saying Google can't mention Google products on google.com? Do you think gmail is somehow not as popular as it is and wouldn't rate the #1 spot for searches for email?
I like to think we are indeed slowly progressing, but at the same time it's clear that companies in power are "progressing" too. I'm unsure if humanitarian goals like this are possible if we regard them as "sooner or later it'll happen".
Interesting thought nonetheless.
are we going to use the IE solution, but instead now force it on providers whom you have to voluntarily choose over another to provide selected results? who gets to choose who appears?
Well, if that failure to rank highly is due to Google manually removing you, I think it's fairly clear whose fault it is.
(It's Google's.)
Edit: To everyone downvoting, can you explain why you expect to be provided guaranteed service from a business that you have no business relationship with?
It should be, though.
It's not 1776. A website like Google is more than a company, it's a public service with immense power of manipulation and influence over countless industries.
The law shouldn't be written like we live in the stone age.
Google does not have the right to avoid being regulated in the public interest.
It's one thing to talk about anti-trust. It's a completely different thing when you're on the same team as the government that would be bringing the case against you.
If anti-trust is your concern, make Google smaller. Regulate what % of marketshare they are allowed to control. Don't allow them to purchase any more competitors. Do things that are actual anti-trust prevention. Saying that the solution is to regulate all these little edge cases is ineffective and inefficient, because you need a different regulation for each concern that are all rooted in the same sentiment: Google is too big.
This is one method, but the massive natural monopoly over search and 'gateway to the Internet' isn't something that is particularly well served by market competition, as we can see here. If we break up google, another monopoly will develop. If we prevent monopolies from developing through strict marketshare percentages, companies will hover at the brink of these %s and lobby and bribe politicians to remove the rules. Which is what they have just done in other media markets, recently. So long as you allow the organizations to be driven by private profit, you will have to struggle against the natural market impulse for every company to exert absolute dictatorial control over as much as possible and expand its power, every moment, every year, every election, at all costs.
You should address the root of the problem (capitalism) not all the little symptoms. Require that companies that provide these public goods be run democratically, transparently by their workers as a public co-op. Nationalize them and make them all open source. There are other solutions.
In addition to everything else wrong with this, what do you do when the workers decide that your niche interest is terrible, horrible, and shouldn't ought to be available to anyone at all?
Using a competing product isn't an option because, in your world, there would be no competition, just the state-owned product and nothing.
Only this time, companies will be lobbying the employees to vote certain ways on issues which could affect search ranking and so on.
How? Because this...
> Don't allow them to purchase any more competitors.
...doesn't achieve that end.
Google could have a thousand competitors and 99% of the marketshare, because just because a competitor exists doesn't compel, or even slightly persuade, anyone to use it.
I'm all for antitrust laws. I just don't see how the usual remedies would work here.
There are also plenty of cases where regulations have greatly improved outcomes by curbing capitalistic eventualities.
I'm personally conflicted about this particular case, and have no idea which will result in a "better" outcome when choosing between non-regulastion and regulation.
However, I strongly believe that limiting Google's overall power is a better solution than regulating particular ways that Google could abuse their power, as I think the former is a better route if regulation is the route you choose.
I dont think Google is quite there yet to be regulated. You have alternative like bing, and you have Duck Duck Go, and the latter actually provide pretty decent results.
Which, however, has nothing to do with the article's point -- disappearance of a single entry with competitive advantage over Google. No statistical significance for search, but instead wielding its enormous power to squelch a small competitor. IMO, if true, this is the case for the government to address via rulemaking, courts or some other means.
An advertiser might care if there were another, more impartial search engine that was drawing those eyeballs away, but that seems vanishingly unlikely given the current ubiquity of Google as a household name and company.
Sure, DuckDuckGo or whatever might draw some of the more tech-literate or paranoid crowd if Google started aggressively filtering results (which, for the record, I don't think they are doing or are likely to do), but why would advertisers care? Those people represent a tiny fraction of their eyeballs, perhaps so small as to be lost in statistical noise. Besides, many/most of the tech-literate folks use adblockers anyway, and the paranoids probably don't want to transmit their personal information online to buy things.
Agreed completely. But users will (eventually) run away if they do not perceive the search as efficient. There are now options in search. People use google exactly because they consider results good enough. If googling "photos from X" starts returning most pictures from Google-associated resorts and this gets coverage from first tier news agencies Google will see non-negligible defections.
I also do not think Google is likely to do aggressive search filtering, not because this is "not right" but for pure self preservation -- aggressive filtering would be cutting the branch they sit on.
> ...advertisers who operate on the assumption that the users see Google searches as mostly efficient and impartial.
I do not believe that is factually accurate. I think advertisers don't have a compelling reason to care whether or not searches are impartial for the reasons I expressed.
Enforce antitrust laws.
Sigh - anybody remember when this was pretty much a given?
Forced (inter-)nationalization of Google under the control of the UN.
>Google has to provide consumers with whatever information they want, whenever they want it, free of charge?
Pretty much yes. Charges should be bared by the Global Federation of Essential Services.
Would this apply to all of google, or just specific product areas (ie, would you only nationalize Search, or Search & Ads, or something else)?
If yes, do tensorflow development now fall under the purview of the UN? Is Android now a partially closed-source, world-government administered, operating system, used by a significant fraction of every human being?
If not, how does one manage infrastructure for the now government administered search system, and corporate everything-else? Do they share the datacenters (and thus give government employees access to the datacenters full of user data), or do they split the datacenters up somehow, and give some to the government, and keep others?
What happens to my existing Google Account? Does the government get access to any of my user data, and if so, which subset? Do we do away with search personalization, or start it over from scratch?
I'm very honestly curious how you would orchestrate this, or expect it to work.
Mostly search. We'll drop the ads. People will be subsidising search already, so no need for ads.
>If yes, do tensorflow development now fall under the purview of the UN?
No, that Alphabet can keep.
>Is Android now a partially closed-source, world-government administered, operating system, used by a significant fraction of every human being?
Yes.
>If not, how does one manage infrastructure for the now government administered search system, and corporate everything-else? Do they share the datacenters (and thus give government employees access to the datacenters full of user data), or do they split the datacenters up somehow, and give some to the government, and keep others?
Every piece of data will be queryable by a simple RESTful API for everybody, including everybody's else search history. We'll call it "radical transparency". This is include the data of government members.
>What happens to my existing Google Account?
It remains as is, only better.
>Does the government get access to any of my user data, and if so, which subset?
Yes, all, see above.
>Do we do away with search personalization, or start it over from scratch?
We kill that. It never worked well anyway.
I'm partly joking, and partly imagining what a sane humanity, that could build and coordinate stuff on a global scale without letting them to the markets, in other words a "Star Trek" like government, would do.
Will UNGoogle have the "one box" answers (eg, music lyrics, weather) which give real information from the search results, or just ten blue links?
Will the employment contracts of existing staff (SWEs, SREs, PMs, lawyercats) be transferred to the UN as well? Will employment be maintained on the current terms?
Will the UN employ more "customer service representatives"? What would staffing levels look like, across the UNGoogle?
Will UNGoogle maintain the existing data relationships as Google? Will UNGoogle purchase eg, Geo data from third-parties, or will it just be their privilege to submit their data to UNGoogle?
What will the process look like at UNGoogle for making changes to the ranking algorithms? Will there be an appeals process if a ranking change is detrimental to your business or national interests?
I guess someone's been reading Picketty ..
And even more important than 30% perhaps, culturally, business-wise, etc.
If you can make an argument to the contrary that doesn't revolve around "it's not 1776!" I'd love to hear it, but I seriously doubt that it would be in line with any US law. I don't think there's anything "stone age" about not requiring private companies to do things to help other private companies without compensation.
The post you're replying to is suggesting that removal from Google results _should_ be part of US law. Perhaps the impact of Google is such that there should be legislation regulating Google's behaviour.
In the UK we have a public phone book maintained by British Telecom. I can opt out of the phone book but BT cannot choose not to include me if I've opted IN. BT is a private company but this one aspect of their output is regulated by law.
The difference between a private company selling a service and something considered an essential utility is legislation, presumably?
As if this excuses any kind of behavior.
Specifically, in this case there are in many countries antitrust laws, which target public and private companies alike.
If our system worked, Google would almost certainly broken up and most of their databases (full of people's private information) couldn't exist legally.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unfair_business_practices
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Competition_law#United_States_...
Their results can influence a great number of people, it can make or break a business, and it can (probably) cause or at least greatly contribute to a revolution in some countries.
You know, hence why countries like China want to control such power.
Google indexing fairly is every bit as essential to the maintaining equal opportunity for websites and businesses on the internet as net neutrality is.
The problem is that when a search engine has the overwhelming majority of the online search market, freedom of information has a strict dependence on the QoS of that engine.
Since people (at least in Europe) have a legal right to freedom of information, if Google is not providing support in this regard, then it's responsible for not respecting rights of European citizens.
edit:
Freedom of information is part of the Swiss constitution too.
> Every person has the right to receive information freely, to obtain it from generally accessible sources and to disseminate it [16.3]
[x] - which is an absurdity in itself - what information? how? when? where? This "right" is just another overreach by the EU et. al. wanting everything to be a "human right" even if it's nonsense. A right to whose information? If I have a unilateral right to information, does that mean I have a right to your medical records? Where do you draw the line? If it's just a right to my own information, which I think is reasonable, Google search results don't qualify.
> does that mean I have a right to your medical records
No, because under data-protection legislation nobody has the right to data about you, but you. More European insanity.
I think GP has incorrectly categorised this as an FOI issue, it's more to do with Antitrust, which is a well worn path in the USA as well.
That's why I believe a decrease in the investment in "traffic acquisition costs" may be in the best interest of Google itself.
Everyone is responsible for the consequences of his own actions. What did we expect?
It would certainly be an improvement and it would give more leverage in avoiding regulatory impositions that in the long term are certainly deleterious (for all).
Perhaps I'm naïve, but I see two possibilities: the acceptance of the overreach in regulations/fines/.., or a self-limitation of the monopoly.
But I'm certainly not in the position to answer the question.
It's not really a big deal that different sets of laws conflict with one another. It's fairly common in fact. For instance Freedom of Speech vs Defamation laws.
Good legislation like good code, accounts for these corner cases. Where it doesn't you have the lawyers and the courts to work it out.
Yes you have. If Google is not representing competitors fairly in search results, that's abuse of dominant position.
If Google has a monopoly on search then break up their monopoly on search in your country.
BUT.
Saying that Google needs to bend over backwards to accommodate every possible edge case of EU human rights (of which there are far too many that are overly broad) as a response to anti-trust concerns is absurd.
In the end, you're just going to end up solidifying Google's monopoly, because Google actually does have the funds to build out such platforms, even if they don't want to. Startup search engines that could help lessen the stranglehold Google has will not have the resources to do the same. If then you governments say "well actually only Google needs to do this", you've found yourself in a position where governments are playing favorites, and that is never a good thing.
If anything, I'd propose the counter-argument that startups can more nimbly respond to these edge-cases, whereas the cost of change for a large hulking conglomerate is where the problems lie.
Until Alphabet buys out that startup for a couple of millions. Imho that's a factor barely mentioned on the issue of "Google monopoly". If anything pops up that looks like it could disrupt the Google dominance, long or short-term, it's quickly acquired and welcomed to the flock.
On one hand that's good because puts the immense resources of Alphabet behind interesting and sometimes important ideas, on the other hand, it leads to a situation where meaningful competition can't grow to a size where it could actually oppose Google's dominance, at least not independently.
Attack anti-trust at it's source. If you find this story worrying, your worry should not be "Google is removing search results", but rather "Google has so much dominance, them removing results is a serious concern".
This addresses your first point: don't force Google to do certain things and then let them buy any and all competitors, instead don't let them buyout all competitors in the first place. It's a much more elegant solution, in my opinion.
this is quite baffling. tech companies are making money hand over fist, they have massive margins, a company like google can afford real support and if they dont think so they should pay in court
Hardly the most appropriate source for learning whether the option worked well for the other end.
Or, Google can get around that by repeatedly tweaking the algorithm on purpose to demote specific types of sites. http://graphics.wsj.com/google-ftc-report/. (long read, but comparison shopping sites didn't violate any guidelines)
There's also the issue of false positives. Machine learning algorithms that demote sites (panda/penguin/vince) certainly have some amount of unintended victims.
most comparsion shopping sites were anoying and did get ranked for everything I wanted to buy. I.e. "buy television" gave you 1. amazon, 2-6. comparsion sites.
If I wanted to compare televisions I would've entered "compare televisions pricing", etc.
https://arstechnica.com/civis/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=1406441&st...
What about Dave Rubin? Does he fall into the same category as nazi propaganda according to you? What about Christina Hoff Sommers? Same question. And the list goes on an on. I do not necessarily agree with these viewpoint but I strongly against censoring them just because it does not fall inline with Google's political agenda.
You are aware that Youtube faced a huge backlash earlier this year from large scale advertisers over "hate videos" and "extremist content": https://www.theverge.com/2017/3/24/15053990/google-youtube-a...
Defining what a "hate video" and is "extremist" can be vague, so it's not surprising that some strong political channels are caught in the crosswinds, even if they are not necessarily "hate speech" or "extreme". (After all, Youtube is probably relying heavily on user feedback to determine what to flag). It's also not surprising that other things are caught in the crosswind (as the Ars Technica article mentions, LGBT content was also caught in the crosswinds.)
Youtube's most recent advertiser-drive purgek came over "inappropriate" videos aimed at children. Again, advertisers are driving what some might call "censorship". https://www.cnet.com/news/youtube-deletes-150000-videos-foll...
Basically, I feel like strong advertiser presence in the future is going to heavily focus Youtube towards more "mainstream" oriented material in the future, especially on what can be monetized.
Is it censorship? Not really -- no one is going to force companies to spend money to advertise where they don't want to. Feel free to start your own video platform that doesn't have Youtube's current corporate advertisement pressure.
At this point, in my opinion, the energy some are spending in fighting Youtube's monetization policy ("1st Amendment" lawsuits against Youtube are going to fail, in my opinion) would be better spent in making sure the web remains open. So that any Youtube competitors, some of which might focus on hosting "non-mainstream" content that Youtube might ignore in the future, actually have a chance.
https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/internet/facebook-halts-potenti...
This was in production for god knows how long.
"Feel free to start your own video platform that doesn't have Youtube's current corporate advertisement pressure."
Well I do not use Youtube as much as I can. I use alternative video content providers. Anyways, this argument is silly at the very least.
Let's throw a counter example on another platform. Most American talk radio is conservative. (https://www.forbes.com/sites/abrambrown/2015/07/13/why-all-t...) IMHO the reasons for this are largely demographic oriented as specified in the Forbes article -- consequently, liberal specific talk radio has not done as well as a business model since, say, the 1980s. Conservative specific talk radio has.
It's pretty easy to Google grumbling from liberals about Clear Channel being conservative and crowding out liberal talk and whatnot. These arguments seem as silly to me as the arguments about the political stance of Google (which I also think is more driven by business dollars and cents, not explicit political lean).
At any rate, what's the solution here? Force Clear Channel to host liberal political talk via government decree? That would be about as awful as forcing Youtube to monetize conservative videos via government decree.
The only arguments that make sense in this direction to me is that American radio, in effect, is a monopoly. It might be difficult to start a "liberal specific talk radio" format even if there was a solid business case for it, because the airwaves are dominated by only a few corporations. (I would argue that this actually played itself out more in the world of music -- a lot of music never crossed into the playlists of corporate radio or MTV, because of various reasons. Which is why Napster was so heavily embraced by many once it showed up.)
Likewise with Google / Youtube: I would be much more receptive to arguments along these lines. If they became a defacto monopoly (I don't think they are there yet, but this is a danger these days), only one "content policy" would exist. And that definitely would be a problem.
Hence why I think the real issue here is keeping the web open and competitive.
[0] https://www.pastemagazine.com/articles/2016/09/censorship-is...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r0c1Bph1jrQ
After all, it goes from the top "We're not arguing for censorship, we're arguing just take it off the page. Put it somewhere else. Make it harder to find." - Eric Schmidt
For any given search many websites have an economic incentive to be at the top and are willing to understand the process and jump though some hoops. However, jumping though hoops has zero correlation with quality and only minimal correlation with relevancy.
It's not an easy job to find a useful mattress review website or whatever, but Google's users don't care about easy they care about how useful something is. Even worse Google's actions end up changing the websites they are linking to. It's a slow but vicious cycle that I don't have a solution to, I just finally realized what the problem was.
This is something notorious and traversal to all its products.
This is Business 101 everywhere except Silicon Valley, which thinks it knows better than everyone else in the world.
What you mean is that low level employees can only manually remove sites following a set of strict guidelines.
Senior management can make whatever editorial decisions they like.
... as well as loud and obnoxious know-it-alls that tag team, upvote their own answers and drown any discussion in irrelevant bickering and deferrals to their own wisdom.
If the search engine is working properly then if the new site looks the same to users it ought to look the same to the search engine. If Google's crawler didn't find the new site at all then they need a better crawler.
Maybe this was incompetence rather than malice on Google's part, but it was one of the two.
(An exception would be if you migrate a site and mess up your robots.txt or similar to forbid the search engine doing its job. But evidently that didn't happen here because the fix was at Google's end.)
This year old article is a bit bogus though. As other pointed out, the hit on SEO came from changing from .ch to .com
ProtonMail, and other similar services, deserve to be supported in my opinion. I have recommended ProtonMail to friends and family. I use them out of personal choice, and I also rely on Fastmail.
I switched to FastMail a while back and while reviewing options, I wanted to use ProtonMail.. but a free option seems far too unreliable for something as important as email. I need to know how they're paying the bills, basically. I prefer their incentives to be perfectly inline with mine, because I am paying their bills for my portion of usage.
They have several tiers, including a free tier. The free tier is pretty limited; I wonder what percentage of their userbase stays there.
Could you point to a source for this? I'm curious, because the article says:
"After that public exchange, ProtonMail was apparently informed within a few days that Google had 'fixed something' — and after that it was able to see immediately positive results"
Switching to a different domain shouldn't _delist_ a site from Google's SERPs as long as the switch is done properly...
Is there any reason to believe ProtonMail did the switch properly? Maybe Google's fix was just to manually correct for ProtonMail botching the switch?
- The spam-support-call volume is too high and the hotline becomes so clogged that users with legitimate complaints don't even bother. As in, a ratio of 1000 SEO assholes to 1 user, 10 hour hold times, etc.
- The hotline is so thoroughly staffed that this becomes the "new SEO" technique (think: robocalls to improve rankings, or contracting firms of humans in $cheap_location to make calls on the SEO person's behalf). Even if legitimate complaints are addressed in the process, the rest of the search results become even more spammy.
- The hotline operators develop an intensely high suspicion threshold for any requests to change a site's appearance in rankings. It becomes known by users with legitimate complaints as a near-impossible uphill battle to get their position back, and is not used by many.
Just saying that $company_name has to be "transparent" and "responsive" doesn't mean anything on its own. I was interested in how you suggest to achieve those feats (read: enforce them)
So here's the problem I see: for the the accountability and transparency you suggest, to decide if Google (Bing, Yahoo, Yandex, Baidu, DDG... is it really a monopoly?) does things right or wrong governing bodies must invent some rules how search engines should work. Surely not a full set of algorithms (that would be an unprecedented disaster) but a set of constraints on those algorithm outputs.
And it has to be an extensive ruleset. I'm sure it's not enough to require that e.g. a registered trademarks must be the first result on exact query, or that querying for Tiananmen Square gets no results. It has to decide for what happens on the intermediate positions, what has more priority and what's legally irrelevant and mustn't show up any high. I think that would be just bad - too many ways to abuse this system.
I thought of also not writing any legislatures but doing some ad hoc rulings, when judges decide what's fair and what's not on the case-per-case basis (basically, civil vs common law), but I'm not sure if that would work any well. In such theoretical scenario I just foresee the insane amount "sue because my site is 5th result and I feel it's unfair to be anything less than 3rd place" cases. That would quickly escalate, judges would end up inventing some common criteria, and we're back to the abovementioned scenario, just sourced differently.
Besides that, there is not much on your site that is of value as to why Google would link to it. It just links to your other projects other sites that you are on. If I do a google search for your name + "spinda", your Github, Twitter, and Keybase entries come up. Then search result #12 or so is your website. I'd say Google is actually doing this right, as it's giving users a direct link to the sites of "value", while your meta-link site may not be as much value to people. Google would rather have people get directly to useful, than having to click through to other sites first.
Now, if you had something on your site that was changing (a blog or something), it may be ranked higher. But as of now, I don't see why Google would put it high up in the rankings.
Oh, that's new. Previously it didn't appear at all in the results, even for specific, targeted queries matching the site content. And I see it's now showing a title and cache link (but no blurb), whereas before it appeared as:
spinda.net
https://spinda.net
https://protonmail.com/support/knowledge-base/protonmail-isr...
Heck, even if somehow radware (the BGP-based DDoS proxy they use) had access to protonmails private key or had minted their own SSL cert for protonmail, you'd still be protected by PGP.
For outgoing mail, they don't use radware so even if you were to send plaintext emails to a mailserver that doesn't support SSL encryption, radware still wouldn't be able to read that.
Unless the linked statement is just a lie, their DDoS protection service is not able to MitM them. Your proposed scheme seems a lot more convoluted than protonmail just giving access to the Israeli government. Similarly, it seems a lot more conspicuous.
If you don't want to use them because it indirectly supports an Israeli company, that makes sense, but their DDoS prevention scheme as outlined does not harm privacy in any way.
You wouldn't, PGP is verified by code that can be MITM'd if the traffic is spoofed.
An accusation has been made, they've refuted the claims with a response, response is dismissed as a PR shield.
What are they going to do?
Or any Chinese company (ties to PLA). Quickly becoming more true in the US as well.
I'd be very interested to hear the problems with protonmail, considering all they claim to see is email metadata.
Edit: ok some quick googling says its related to ddos protection, which is still in effect currently, the malicious intent here seems overstated.
The official statement - https://protonmail.com/support/knowledge-base/protonmail-isr...
posteo implements multiple encryption schemes: encrypt incoming mails with GPG (making them inaccessible by any end device not having the corresponding secret key). Or encrypt via the login passphrase with transparent decryption on authorized access.
If posteo wants, they can read all incoming email. Their security scheme depends solely on their good intentions. Still great that their data at rest is encrypted in a way even they cannot read.
The scheme does defend against third parties outside of posteo being able to access data, or coerce posteo to decrypt data. Posteo could probably still be coerced to push out a fraudulent client update that still breaks their encrpytion, but that is a very hard problem to deal with.
They are based in Germany and would need to be coerced in accordance to german law. I don't think that there is something like National Security Letters in Germany, so doing such a thing without (eventual?) public disclosure seems unlikely.
Also posteo regularly releases as much information as they are allowed to regarding their interaction with law enforcement, e.g.:
In any case, the fraudulent client update is a very hard hole to patch. The only solution for this I know of is local hosting. At the moment, defending against this in web-apps is simply not possible.
Ipfs. Its immutable, for a given key. And its easy to see what an IPNS link points to.
It may not be a way to verify, but others could do that hard work.
But it strictly shows proof that codebase for a web app hasn't changed.
That's why this was switched to doing it in a webapp, to streamline the process and remove user error out of the equation. There's one problem, and that the owner of the script can change it to a bad one that does X.
With an immutable data structure, like what IPFS uses, can provide that chain of custody with a script they make that simplifies PGP usage, while still maintaining "We didn't change anything" - and you can prove that.
Some mail servers are set up or can be configured to not trannsmit or receive mails unless TLS protocol can be negotiated (I think mailbox.org allows users to enforce SMTP via TLS by using the domain secure.mailbox.org, not sure about Posteo).
(See also https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc7258
https://support-en.mailbox.org/knowledge-base/article/before...)
[edit] replaced SSL with TLS
So you can only read them in your mail client with GPG support.
Yes, mailbox could create copy of your email before encryption. But assuming that they don't/didn't so far, in case they change their mind the historical emails will not be accessible.
The other solution where they keep private key (pass protected), well sure, that pretty much open for abuse but at some level you have to start trusting the law, otherwise everything false apart.
The only issue is "German" quality customer support. So be patient and expect to receive terse "no." ;)
[1] https://www.hrw.org/news/2013/12/26/french-contradictions-da... [2] https://www.opendemocracy.net/digitaliberties/sara-bundtzen/...
I'm running a custom theme to remove the Google search bar from my Android phone, installed Firefox Quantum and set up a Mozilla account, so now everything is gone from Google except my Gmail and that will happen next along with Dropbox too.
If you want Google to be a better organization then you have to vote with your feet. Do that and your voice will eventually mean something, but until then Google won't listen.
On the one hand, net neutrality is truly a problem: evil ISPs decide for you what you will and will not see. On the other hand, google, youtube, facebook, twitter and others already decide this for you. But you don't even know that they don't show things to you.
(sorry for poor translation from Russian)
Other countries are already starting work against Google. The power Google wields over the general public warrants severe investigation at even the hint of abuse of power.
If you plot this over time and see a sudden drop you know Google has identified you as a threat.
But again, you are acting as if there is a definitive answer to the query [secure email] (which is one mentioned at the top of the article, and what inspired my comment). Among the results - after a healthy block of ads (and since this is an article from 2016, Protonmail) - I saw a page about setting up Mozilla Thunderbird, Hushmail, and numerous blogs/articles about eg "The 5 Best Secure Email Solutions". This is not to say there wasn't a problem back in 2016; I just mean that on a broad query like [secure email] with probably dozens or hundreds of good results, not seeing one in particular is not really a red flag that something is wrong to me, the way not seeing ProtonMail for the query [protonmail] would be.
Meanwhile, people immediately jump in with accusations of "Perfidy!", assuming that Google must have Done Something, and simultaneous with that demands that Google Do Something, and complaints that it is hard to get Google to Do Something whenever you find such an obvious problem.
And from the inside, you just sort of have to laugh-cry whenever this comes up, because (despite some fraction of techies wanting Google to act like an SQL query on the web) you are intimately familiar with the legendary Algorithm as an immense, constantly mutating series of heuristics running on inputs which (being from the web) are frequently garbage. You debug queries constantly, and while very rarely there is an obvious, correctable data problem or bug, you are really working to identify "loss patterns", large numbers of queries that are wrong in the same way for the same reasons. Your job as a ranking engineer is to then try to correct these loss patterns, knowing that when you do you'll be creating new, smaller loss patterns. Smaller because you spend years of your life evaluating your changes to make sure they are creating fewer problems than they fix.
And though you spend all your days carrying baskets of pebbles from the valley of losses to the mountaintop of good answers people crowd around you to point at a particular pebble lying on the ground, declare it the most important pebble and demand you put down your basket and carry it to the top of the mountain first, cradled gently in both hands. And each person in the crowd points at a different pebble, demanding the same thing.
</rant>
(No, really, it's a very rewarding job with challenging work and they treat you pretty good here; if you're interested in the problem, I encourage you to apply. There are a lot of pebbles left.)
That's slightly different, no?
I find it very, very hard to believe that HN readers would vote such a comment to the top.
Apropos of which, it's in the site guidelines not to bring in insinuations of astroturfing unless there's actual evidence, so could you please not do that on HN?
> ProtonMail tracked this situation through Spring 2016, trying to get in touch with Google to query why it had vanished from search results — and initially having no luck getting a response. It only eventually got an acknowledgment of the complaint in August after it had tweeted at Google staff.
It wouldn't take anything away from your response just leaving that question out.
BTT: Why is this even an article on here anyway when the situation has been dealt with one year ago? The title should already mention that it's from 2016.
* Please read submissions before commenting on them
Back in 2006 or so when the address field became a search bar in most major browsers, I started to get a lot of traffic from Google, but 99% was searching for mydomain.com, I'm not talking about that kind of traffic, I'm talking about SEO keywords that will kill your business over night when (not if) Google change their formula or some algorithm removes your site from the search result.
It's a bit upsetting that web browsers have monetized the address bar, but that's another, yet important discussion.
If it's true that this has happened, then they need to have a regulatory oversight body right up in their operations.
The power of search engine is immense - they could change stock market outcomes, election outcomes, entire economies.
If a substantial part of your funnel is attached to another company's whims then maybe it was past time to think about your strategy for building product and brand awareness.
>"“The only reason we survived to tell this story is because the majority of ProtonMail’s growth comes from word of mouth, and our community is too loud to be ignored."
Again it was up to you to diversify what sounds like an over reliance on Google for 25% of your growth. Portraying that as into "victim survivor" story is a bit dramatic.
This sounds like a yarn they are spinning for potential investors. And not a very good one.
The point is you shouldn't rely on the vagaries of a third party for your business growth period. More especially a third party you don't appear to have any relationship with. They even admit in the blog post that the majority of their growth comes form "word of mouth." Word of mouth and "hoping for the bes"t with Google searches is not really a solid marketing plan.