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Comment by teekert | Hacker News Reader

Or you protect your own IP, I wonder if ProtonVPN could have done that? Would have been a nice test of those claims as well.

All in all, I still trust ProtonMail, they are handling this quite well and transparently. Their original messaging was probably a compromise between getting the message out there and leaving some room for things like this. Arguably that was a mistake, or maybe with the whole truth in bold on the front page, people would have flocked less to ProtonMail? I still don't agree with that original messaging though, as they don't themselves anymore.

Still pretty great free service if you ask me. If a family plan was cheaper I'd have migrated everyone there a long time ago.

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I agree that they are a great email provider, the lesser evil, and I myself use a paid plan. But I believe that, as a society, we are rolling down a slippery slope where digital privacy becomes more difficult everyday.

A couple of weeks ago, it was Apple announcing that they will spy by default in all of their customers via the iPhones because of child pornography. Apple has spent galleons of gold marketing itself as a privacy-first company and they are not a pushover; for them to do that, whatever is going on behind the curtains must be grim.

I thought it would be a few years before somebody wanted to use something like that technology for something less serious. Then yesterday the news broke that courts had forced ProtonMail to break their business just so the French police could find a climate activist.

In my view, we are heading to a world where our electronic devices and services will be used to prosecute petty crimes, like drinking alcohol in Arab countries or even parking over the line anywhere else.

Their intentions are good, the law is vague and easy to abuse and we slide down that slippery slope. Don't blame PM for having to adhere to the law. In their latest announcements they advise you to use TOR, then you won't have this problem and your emails will be encrypted beyond anyone's reach. Well... [0]

[0]: https://xkcd.com/538/

Why would anyone trust ProtonMail? If you're not doing anything shady you don't need E2E. If you're doing something that attracts police attention - and relative triviality is clearly not a factor - what they're offering won't protect you.

Saying "Well, you could also use our VPN as well" is more marketing. Of course they'll have to comply with legal requests for that too.

This is a political issue. What's missing is the legal oversight which prevents overreach. Demanding logs to catch a mass murderer is one thing. Demanding logs to catch someone who is being financially and politically irritating is on a completely different level and much harder to justify.

ProtonVPN or a similar service would have helped that.

They are only required to provide the IP Addresses from ProtonMail but ProtonVPN gets different treatment legally speaking, were they cannot (currently) force logging [0][1].

[0] https://protonvpn.com/support/no-logs-vpn/ [1] checked with Andy Yen (CEO/Founder)

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