I think the argument is that their advertising is misleading (i.e. if they really didn't keep logs, there would be nothing to hand over)
https://protonmail.com/privacy-policy
They also provide a report of all warrants received https://protonmail.com/blog/transparency-report/
And even on their English website, the marketing is misleading. They say that the service is "anonymous" and also: "By default, we do not keep any IP logs which can be linked to your anonymous email account".
https://protonmail.com/blog/protonmail-mr-robot-secure-email...
Scroll down to comment:
> Liam, October 14, 2015 at 10:30 PM
> But https://protonmail.com/security-details page says “No tracking or logging of personally identifiable information. Unlike competing services, we do not save any tracking information. We do not record metadata such as the IP addresses used to log into accounts.” So, now it turns to be that you introduced tracking and logging? Is this data encrypted as well?
> Admin, October 17, 2015 at 9:14 PM
> We don’t save any of this data by default, the user must explicitly turn it on for us to save it.
There should be a reasonable assumption that given they have end-to-end encryption for the service, they just encrypt the logging for the user and store it encrypted without the key themselves like they do the emails.
Also to note, they at least have an onion link to use their email service.
https://twitter.com/andyyen/status/1434600373059297284
"As described in the link above, under Swiss law, we can be forced to collect info on accounts belonging to users under criminal investigation. This is obviously not done by default, but only if we get a legal order."
Activists beware.
Weird definition of privacy we've got going these days
If it's illegal to provide a completely anonymous email service, then you should not claim to provide a completely anonymous email service.
Except maybe Lavabit, that guy apparently shut everything down to avoid doing something along these lines. So maybe he wasn't actually lying.
Also: One more reason NAT was a good thing over IPv6. The closer we get to the platonic ideal of "UUID per person" the more likely justice systems will use it that way.
The day everyone learns how to self-host mail on ephemeral compute instances is the day law enforcement starts requiring MX domain logs to be maintained in a historical manner. Work around that magically, and some law'll go on the books to try to tame the super spooky criminal communicators hiding from law enforcement.
This is why we can't have nice things.
This still doesn’t protect your privacy because your ISP knows what prefix they gave you and will likely provide that to the authorities if you broke the law while using that address. Just like they would even if you used NAT and ipv4 so I don’t get where the parent comment thinks that is protecting their privacy at all.
IP's address Internet endpoints, not people using them, yet States, prosecutors, and law enforcement regularly try to create the illusion that an IP has anything to do with who uses something.
IPv6 makes that temptation worse. IPv4 forces you to realize IP's can be ambiguous. IPv6, through having more addresses than people on Earth, checks off the Institutional checkbox for "raw material to contribute to a UUID identity scheme". Just look at China's proposals for a more governable international Telecom network, and the intention to use device persistent addressing as a control mechanism becomes obvious.
Where IPv4 creates enough decentralization and localized namespace unscrambling to provide enough friction via statefulness to thwart these types of efforts, I'm not at all confident IPv6 will do the same. I believe it is just what the Doctor ordered for laying the foundation of coupling IP's and net addresses in the minds of the masses to personal identifiers.
Which is not by any stretch the way we want things to go.
My iPhone spoofs the MAC address each time it connects to WiFi, so support for changing your /64 is not going to be a challenge even with consumer devices. Whether we lose this ability or not is another question (but they could easily make the same requirements of “hard device uuid” on IPv4 if they wanted. These are laws and regulations after all, not technical limitations).
If anything IPv6 gives you an even greater amount of plausible deniability because like you said you could be running a vpn with a billion different devices connecting to it.
IPv6 just means your laptop could have an internet routable IP associated with it. You can easily change to one of the billions upon billions of possible addresses that your assigned prefix will give you (just like you could have something like 10.0.0.0/8 with millions and millions of addresses behind your internet routable IPv4 address. Your ISP will turn you over all the same if the authorities ask who that address belongs to.
> No personal information is required to create your secure email account. By default, we do not keep any IP logs which can be linked to your anonymous email account. Your privacy comes first.
Except your phone number? That's highly personal. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28428092
(I recall encountering this too when creating an account a few months ago.)
If you need trust, theres no way around rolling your own service.
I'm not sure how your tech-stack has to look like for you to claim that you can't log IP addresses and user-agents etc...
That's a cute idea, but it won't get them out of complying with a warrant.
This does not mean you need to log everything all the time. (usually that is actually quite illegal too) but you need to have infrastructure in place to allow for police investigations.
I don't get how people don't understand this. companies need to operate according to the law of the land, this being one of them.