I understand that shady people are doing a lot of shady things with such services, but when equally shady people (criminals, terrorists, pedophiles, etc.) use platforms like Facebook or WhatsApp to commit extremely serious crimes nobody is taking Facebook or WhatsApp offline.
What is the rationale behind this?
Closing Guerrilla Mail will upset us a lot but the rest of the world will ignore it. Close Whatsapp and the world will be a chaos.
OVH cannot do that, they only rent physical servers, they have no information about the software or the user. If the police comes knocking, the only thing that can be done is to shutdown or seize the servers.
The police must have something against some users of guerilla mail (not a surprise given the nature of the service), they probably went against the servers because they couldn't get a reply or any action from guerilla mail. I checked and found no contact information and no ownership information on their website.
"Please contact us on Twitter / Facebook" is not a receivable contact information.
FYI: A website is required by (French) law to have legal mentions including the company name, address, director, company registration number...
It was hosted in Canada on space owned by a Canadian company.
Any law enforcement should contact guerillamail not the hardware hoster.
Only if gurillamail itself is classified as a criminal organization or similar should OVH be contacted for takedown. Even then gurillamail still should be informed about the exact legal court order which caused that so that they can take appropriate actions.
The fact that they are taken down supposedly because of the law enforcement but no reason is given is SUPER fishy and smell like non law compliment overreach.ail
What do you think happens when the hoster receives an official warrant to disclose who is one particular customer? They shutdown the customer.
It should be handled better. On that we can agree.
It depends very much on who does the requesting, and how much pushback there will/would be, and how it will be dealt with. (In China, the pushback doesn't really matter, in Brazil it still does.)
> if there is a request to take something offline, then it should be followed.
It doesn't. Guerrilla Mail could very easily (and relatively cheaply) house their own infrastructure (a single 1U server ?) in their own rack and self provide their hosting.
The takedown notices would go to them. Subpoenas would go to them. They would be served and have great leeway in deciding how to respond and what information to share.
Further, placing the entire operation inside a corporate entity would insulate the owners and allow them to slow down the entire legal/notice/response process.
You do not have to rely on intermediary providers to publish your website.
Whatsapp may not be secure and the NSA and co may be listening in. I don't believe their end-to-end encryption claim has to be accurate. And it may be end-to-end encrypted but the NSA has a master key to said encryption.
Given how there's services like Encrochat, I believe the dodgy side of society is aware of Whatsapp not being secure and are avoiding it.