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Comment by numpad0 | Hacker News Reader

It’s not a lie; it said “By default, we do not…”. So under any non-default situations they always could. I guess.

From the article:

>The firm's privacy policy, which was updated yesterday, now says: "If you are breaking Swiss law, ProtonMail can be legally compelled to log your IP address as part of a Swiss criminal investigation."

That makes it sound like they normally do not / did not log the IP, but then got orders from the police the log these particular IPs.

If that is the case, why did they remove this statement? It seems to me that if the statement remained true even though this guy got arrested, it would be true under the "by default" clause. By removing it, they indicate it was never true; or, I suppose, they discovered just how fun it is to get people arrested, and decided to change their policy on the fly!

I was even considering switching to them...

They clearly changed it because of the amount of backlash they got and because so many people called that statement deceptive. Just because it's true doesn't mean it's smart to say it and them removing the statement is absolutely reasonable.

> If that is the case, why did they remove this statement?

As far as I understand according to several comments I read here in HN "99%" of the people don't understand what "by default" means, making the sentence misleading for most.

Most were falling for the trickey in wording and they are mad.

Throwing in a word like default changes the entire meaning.

Instead of we don't log anything*

* we log only when requested

They should say your ip can be logged.

It's like saying in big headline.

No meat burgers *

* meat means carots

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