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Comment by fsckboy | Hacker News Reader

You may not have given it much thought before, but the idea (in your head, let's say) that Protonmail keeps no logs and thus completely protects you from ip-address discovery by law enforcement would imply that one could freely solicit and exchange unencrypted child pornography with strangers with no fear of detection.

I'm not saying "think of the children", I'm saying "think of law enforcement and the judicial system"

thinking about it now in retrospect, do you think that really could have been a possibility? I don't.

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> thinking about it now in retrospect, do you think that really could have been a possibility?

The only thing I am saying is that if real privacy is not a possibility (and it may very well not be), they shouldn't pretend they are selling real privacy. I am not saying they should find a way to do the impossible and legally avoid laws. I am saying they should not pretend their service is any more private than it actually is.

Think of it this way: imagine someone starts advertising a magic potion that stops aging. People buy it, but they predictably continue to age and die. If someone starts protesting, we shouldn't say "what are you complaining about? what do you want the seller to do? break the laws of nature? that's ridiculous." We should say, "we really should stop that guy from making baseless promises about his potions".

if they are making a good faith effort to give all the real privacy you can expect, I don't think they have a particular duty to water down their marketing messages by going into distracting detail that criminals shouldn't have the same expectations. They did disclose within their terms that they don't by default keep logs, and they do need to comply with court orders.

Assuming people who really use their services are criminals is like assuming someone who cares about a car's details is an illegal street racer.

I use Protonmail to provide tools for journalists, teachers, and whistleblowers, and people who are in danger from folks who mark them "criminals".

While you're probably right that this would not be allowed, I fail to understand why so many people thinktthis is normal. The postal system can't open your letters to check if there's CP in them, so it used to be that you could send CP over the mail between PO boxes and feel safe. Yet having untraceable communication over the internet is considered unthibkable for some reason.

> The postal system can't open your letters to check if there's CP in them, so it used to be that you could send CP over the mail between PO boxes and feel safe.

Wat? You better stop sending anything incriminating via the mail, they totally can and will open your letters if there's a court order.

If there's a court order. With digital data, companies are forced to scan my data in their storage to see if it's copyright infringing or CP or others.

And to be clear, I don't think people have any kind of right to create, disseminate, or even view CP. But that doesn't mean that any guarantees to data privacy should be thrown away.

> With digital data, companies are forced to scan my data in their storage to see if it's copyright infringing or CP or others.

I don't think they are. What Apple & friends are doing is voluntarily. There's no requirement for e.g. your webhoster do scan your data, or your email provider to scan your emails. Case in point: ProtonMail doesn't, and they're not violating the law by not doing so.

In this case law enforcement know who they were after, in that situation they would also have been able to intercept physical mail.

True, I was thinking more of the requirement on cloud providers to scan data proactively.

You may not have given it much thought before, but the idea (in your head, let's say) that Protonmail keeps no logs and thus completely protects you from ip-address discovery by law enforcement would imply that one could freely solicit and exchange infornation about climate activism with strangers with no fear of detection.

I'm not saying "think of the climate", I'm saying "think of law enforcement and the judicial system"

thhinking about it now in retrospect, do you think that really could have been a possibility? I don't.

This seems like a scapegoat argument

I don't read it that way. More like, "keep this extreme example in mind, and see if you still expect the guarantees to hold up".

If you don't, then they won't either for whatever activities you're doing, that aren't as reprehensible as CSAM, but some government may think otherwise.

It's kind of depressing reasoning maybe. But if a privacy-preserving system is actually that, then even the most technically-savvy terrorists and child abusers should have no qualms about using it as well.

on the wall at your dry cleaner is a sign, "we are not responsible if your clothing gets ruined" and there's a sign at the parking garage, "we are not responsible if your car gets damaged".

But, you have the right to expect that the dry cleaner and parking garage will take reasonable care with your belongings and will not act in ways that are negligent, the signs they put up notwithstanding.

There's no scapegoating, it's a question of what should a reasonable person expect from a transaction. Protonmail said they don't keep logs by default and that they also need to respect court orders.

Would be curious to see a diff of Proton's privacy policy over the next few weeks.

You need to think bigger. How could Protonmail make the world a better place in this regard? Promote Tor to users through its blog? Report on Tor usage stats? Enable account creation through Tor without requiring a cell phone?

All of the above and more.

As far as I can tell, that actually is possible between Protonmail users

PM addresses to PM addresses are encrypted. All it takes is a mistakenly made carbon-copy / blind-carbon-copy to a Gmail account and all that encryption goes out the window

Many countries actually have laws that say you HAVE to log.

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