Well for a start the privacy policy of Gmail allows them to use your data for advertising purposes.
Secondly, emails encrypted at rest, are still encrypted, so at least the body is protected.
Unless you were receiving emails that were encrypted prior to being sent that wouldn't be the case with Gmail.
The threat model for Protonmail is fairly clearly defined under the "ProtonMail recommended use cases". https://protonmail.com/blog/protonmail-threat-model/
The fact still remains email was probably not the right tool for these people as there is a lot of data stored server side.
This is false - google stopped doing this for personal accounts many years ago (and never did for paid corporate).
> emails encrypted at rest
Google also encrypts at rest
Does seem to be the case https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/jun/26/google-wi...
> (and never did for paid corporate).
We weren't talking about Workspaces.
However that said, people logged into gmail generally use google search so they get to use all the data collected from that and youtube videos you watch so I don't think it really matters too much. https://support.google.com/google-ads/answer/7019460?hl=en
With ProtonMail they can't actually read the contents of your emails, even for law enforcement, whereas Google certainly would be able to hand over entire copies.
Honest question, because that's the obvious difference (if you believe ProtonMail claims).
Obviously they can modify their software to capture your decryption password, my question is more out of curiosity than it being a serious advantage against a state actor targeting you specifically.
I am fairly sure that protonmail cannot do this without modifying the software to target me by capturing the decryption password.
Of course they can always capture plaintext messages as they come in, we can only assume they don't keep records of that. If that's true, and we only have their word for that, it would make any requests forward focused, like a wire tap rather than a search of old bank records. They can't necessarily access old emails without explicit effort.
It's not some insurmountable barrier, and I don't mean to suggest it is. It's trivial to think of at least three ways to work around it, assuming you are still logging in. But it is a difference in design.
There is your answer.
What I have no idea about is Google. Do they even need to do anything targeting you in order to decrypt the data or not? Obviously they can modify your software with a remote update such that they can capture your decryption password, but that's a lot more work than querying a database and using a master key that Google has on hand for this sort of thing.
While (as you correctly pointed out) the fact that you lose access to the data if you lose your passphrase doesn't prove that the data is completely inaccessible without it, the opposite (being able to access the data even if you forget/lose all your secrets/keys) conclusively proves that such access is possible.
You can't. But this really doesn't answer if there was a special way for law enforcement, which I don't believe there is.
Encryption. That was always the point. Your emails are stored encrypted, and nobody can read their content except you.
Not sure why some people expected ProtonMail to act as a magical VPN, both truly anonymous and not obeying to any court order, to an unencrypted email account like Gmail.