Fair point.
I am not a shill...
They advertised themselves with a 'no-log policy'. This policy however used the phrase "by default, [...]" and and said that they don't store IP data. This is true, that statement was never breached as far as we know.
The court requested Proton to start logging data for this single account in question for the investigation, because the account owners had broken swiss national law.
"[Proton] could not appeal because a Swiss law had actually been broken and because "legal tools for serious crimes" were used. ProtonMail does not believe the tools were appropriate for the case at hand, but the company was legally responsible to comply with their use nonetheless." [0]
What would you want Proton to do in this case? Close down shop and not give out PII or rather comply and keep operating? You can't just discard an entire operation of this size bcause one of one account.
We are on the same side here, we both want Proton to do better and to have an email service that is actually secure. As long as any company or organization operating an email service is inside any jurisdiction it will face these issues. But the jurisdiction is also the enabler to these companies or organizations like this.
I don't think we are ever going to get the perfectly secure mail service that protects our privacy, resists governments and threat actors to an absolute degree, and operates servers and services at the same time like Proton does. If anything, FOSS self-hosted options are probably the closest to the above we are going to get.
edit: If Proton designed their services to not collect data from the start, like a lot of commenters here are proposing, that could be a real opportunity. This strategy however only works in very stable democratic systems, as unstable ones are always at the mercy of their governments and as such are vulnerable to privacy intrusions.
[0] https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2021/09/priva...