Proton is trying to become Google without your data
wired.com
wired.com
Having a tab always open in my browser for my mail seems so wrong.
However, for my uses I simply installed proton bridge + apple mail. It just works with all email services I use.
Different protocols for one thing - HTTP vs IMAP and/or POP/SMTP.
Each webmail app does things it’s own way. Webmail conflates the app and the protocol and the provider. Some people prefer to have mail from different providers in a unified app.
I'm very happy with the Bridge integrated with Neomutt on Fedora Linux.
I think Protonmail started with a privacy-focused business case (for which E2EE is a key feature), but is now expanding into the broader pool of people who want to pay for an ad-free, no-data-scanning email, but are not concerned about targeted spying and prefer the simplicity of a convenient setup. For that crowd, IMAP would make more sense. My 2c.
I'm a recent Google GSuite refugee, so it's hard breaking the habit of web based mail I suppose.
Edit IF its not politicians ignoring emails, then we have evidence that a private US antivirus companies is illegally interfering in the democratic process of so called allies and you can work this out with mxtoolbox.com, but we all know the US of A views everyone including allies as an enemy, because their actions and occupations speak louder than words! Can send a man to the moon but cant stop a shooter speaks volumes!
It sucks that people use wide swaths like this, but that's how the cookie crumbles when you have a problem at 3 in the morning that you need to fix now and then go back to bed.
I known www.urban-automotive.co.uk are losing out on business because they block protonmail accounts as I'm sure many other businesses are!
Hitting those who dont understand privacy in the wallet is an easy accomplishment!
Well, I know what I'm not using if I ever have a need for an ML pipeline.
Like I said, I was paged in the middle of the night because protonmail accounts were being created at a rate of hundreds per second to use our hosted free trial to mine crypto. So I blocked the domain name. I'm not saying this is wonderful or anything, but it is what I had to do at the time.
I see that my post got massively downvoted, but this is the thought process for people administering things. You get overrun and then you make a rash decision. I basically had the choice to to block protonmail from using the free trial, eliminate free trials, or require everyone in the Universe to type in a credit card, pay their bill and not dispute the charges for 90 days. I chose the first one. Free trials continued for the vast majority of the world. But hey, we ended up deciding not to do the cloud offering (in part because of this), so maybe I fucked up that decision.
I'll definitely be thinking about fraud/risk from day 1 the next time I do a cloud service, so that innocent users of email domains abused by fraudsters are not unfairly discriminated against. I didn't do it the first time, and that's on me. I just wanted to share the thought process of someone in the trenches; not make a value judgement of your email provider! You as an individual user of some service can't be held accountable for the actions of the other users of that service. I get that and I feel bad about what I did at the time.
But, having been where the UK government is, I totally get where they're coming from. That's all I wanted to say. Protonmail can do some vetting of their customers, so that their emails become more trustworthy, if they feel like it. That would make their product more valuable for all the legitimate users.
I had similar issues with signups from Proton. I use the service myself so I didn't want to block it at the domain level, I hope they address this soon.
Commoditizing it is a recipe for disaster.
Edit: Expansion of the self-respect tidbit. Lack of privacy enables others to have control over you. Feeling like you are not in control, or actually being controlled by someone (shame, blackmail, etc.) can be very damaging to your mental health. Respect yourself, strive for privacy. You deserve it as much as anyone else.
maybe democratizing privacy is a better way to phrase than commoditization — which implies some cost savings rather than the just consumer availability.
Yes, I definitely agree with you--democratization is a much better way to put it.
Do you have evidence that Proton does not actually encrypt their emails?
>Real privacy is not the result of some product,
I do wholeheartedly agree with this, at least. Privacy is a scale and there are many, many pieces which tip the scale one way or the other.
It doesn't matter. Proton supplies the client software, so if they want (or are forced to by law enforcement), they can easily push an update that exfiltrates decrypted data back to their server.
However, lacking the other data point (e.g. knowing who has sent me an email from a service that does not encrypt their emails, and being able to access that email from that account), my emails are not readable without my secret.
I never claimed that Proton can encrypt someone else's emails.
I put "encryption" in quotes to indicate nuance in the characterization. A locksmith installs an amazing door and lock at my home, but keeps a copy of the key at the shop - I think a fitting analogy for what Protonmail is essentially doing here. This isn't a value judgement - such a setup is perfectly reasonable for most people's threat model - rather an honest apprehension of actual trust boundaries.
It's a hard problem, and a problem applicable to many domains. How do you communicate nuance that requires multiple years of education to people who don't have multiple years of education? I don't know.
Their encryption is based on PGP and therefore only message contents are "E2E" encrypted. Subject, From, To, etc. are not. These fields contain most of the information already. For example, Amazon puts the name of the ordered item in the subject line, so they can still see what you ordered.
And I'm putting "E2E" in quotes because if the sender does not send encrypted emails, then they can read the full content at delivery time, obviously. They immediately encrypt them with your public key and they claim that they discard the unencrypted version after that but there is no way we can verify that.
Long story short: you still have to trust your email provider after all. If I'd want to switch away from Google, I'd probably switch to some "normal" email provider (Fastmail, Apple, etc.). The benefits of "E2E" encryption for email are questionable and the drawbacks huge (for example search is very limited). But competition is good and I'm glad they are advancing.
I never claimed they were.
>These fields contain most of the information already
Except, you know, the body of the email.
>Amazon puts the name of the ordered item in the subject line, so they can still see what you ordered.
Yes, Proton is not a panacea. Again, never claimed it was. You can't just abandon all opsec because you use Proton, I agree.
>Long story short: you still have to trust your email provider after all. If I'd want to switch away from Google, I'd probably switch to some "normal" email provider (Fastmail, Apple, etc.). The benefits of "E2E" encryption for email are questionable and the drawbacks huge (for example search is very limited).
I agree with the point about trust. You have to trust your hardware wasn't backdoored on the way out of the factory, too. Security and privacy are about trade-offs and weighing risks. I've weighed my risks and made my choices.
Depending who is your enemy (threat model), I guess proton tools can help you protect your intimacy though.
Why wouldn't I support them ? If i care about privacy I should support companies that care about it too, no?
Proton is not perfect, the android mobile app currently doesn't have conversion view neither contact sync, and the desktop bridge doesn't implement Dav protocol, but its the best out there for people who want to protect their privacy.
And if you care about privacy, you shouldn't be using anything made in Australia.
It seems to me that the only private email would be no email.
Why's a privacy-first service logging IPs in the first place?
> Why's a privacy-first service logging IPs in the first place?
> French police sent a request to Swiss police via Europol to force the company to obtain the IP address of one of its users
They weren't logging until they were forced to.
A while back on the very hackernews thread when the news of the French activist being jailed it was highly discussed, the source of the data being ProtonMail themselves
[0] https://protonmailrmez3lotccipshtkleegetolb73fuirgj7r4o4vfu7...
Yes, you could do all that. But if you're doing all that, you can also just use Gmail.
I like the exchange of value that comes from paying money for a service. With free products from companies like Google you do not pay for the service and there is no exchange of value. This results in the myriad of HN threads discussing how Google Docs did them wrong (locked out, privacy violation, etc.)
In short alot of dickheads use it for spam/scam and ruin it for the rest of us.
I do not know how they can overcome that…
Don't think they'll keep me private & safe...but I do think they'll try harder & more earnestly than the rest of the gang attempting it.
Why, though? What do people base this assertion on, other than clever marketing materials which extol virtually meaningless controls like "it's hosted abroad" (which is actually much worse for foreign nationals' privacy, for example)?
Not US based for starters - definitely willing to pay a premium for that.
Nor five eyes or any of the other [0] eyes.
> extol virtually meaningless controls like "it's hosted abroad"
There is no value in abroad in itself, what matters is how trigger happy countries are with warrants etc.
I'd like to be in a jurisdiction where it is possible for law enforcement to get to the data...but I'd like the logistically/legal hurdles to be rather high so that it is only done for serious concerns not trawler net catch all surveilance operations. Switzerland seems to tick those boxes
Indeed. I'm part of the 96% of the world that is not though and I'm very wary of US tendencies to trawler net data collection.
>"Swiss are probably good at privacy stuff".
I think you missed my point if that is what you got from my post. I don't attribute any special merit to Switzerland in the Swiss banking sense...they just aren't in any of the major data sharing agreement from what I can tell. My data needs to be somewhere...so I'm just picking this on a lesser evil basis not perfect basis.
Citation needed.
I get that, in theory, US state level actors shouldn't be spying on US citizens acting within the US but the vast majority of us are more likely to get caught up in bog standard law enforcement activities. A US based provider will be forced to comply with a lawful court order from a US court. A Swiss based company (for example) can safely ignore such requests.
If you sue Switzerland for violating your right to privacy, Swiss courts won't do anything, because you're not a Swiss citizen. If you sue American courts for violating your right to privacy, American courts won't do anything, because the US constitution only binds the US[0] and not Switzerland. There is plenty of law, precedent, and/or jurisprudence[1] in both jurisdictions that restricts a country spying on their own citizens, but not a country spying on other countries' citizens. So yes, the Swiss company can technically ignore a US court order, but Switzerland can issue their own court orders that will have far few protections for you.
That's also not to mention that the basis for jurisdiction is actually really broad. Like, some countries will actually use "speaking our language" as a jurisdictional basis. So the likelihood of a Swiss company being able to resist a court order is lower than you think - basically the company would have to cut all ties with the US and forego the entire US market to protect you.
Of course, I'm writing all of the above assuming you are an innocent, privacy-conscious individual, where:
1. The balance of US law is in your favor
2. Swiss law is not
3. Stolen information can be laundered across jurisdictions
If you are actually committing crimes, then both US and Swiss law are against your right to privacy, and adding more jurisdictions will absolutely help you in the sense that it makes it far harder to investigate your crimes. That's the sort of thing that the "Swiss privacy law" hype is trying to market off of. The spymasters generally don't like the idea of letting regular law enforcement agencies (LEAs) touch their tools, if only because the evidence they gathered probably isn't actually admissible. So LEAs have to go through official channels[2], which are actually slower and less efficient than things like Five Eyes.
[0] State Actors doctrine notwithstanding
[1] French for "precedent, but we're not doing that 'common law' thing the filthy English do"
[2] CLOUD Act and parallel construction notwithstanding
Yeah, Wired, they only did the spying during the Bush era... edit: I guess it was less secret after the Bush era
> It's even harder to say, look, we've got to accept that some amount of child exploitation is going to happen and people are going to use digital tools to spread it. But at some point, I think you do have to defend the principle that we have to tolerate a certain amount of even the very worst things if we want to have meaningful civil liberties.
Not a very popular argument at this particular instant in time / news, bold of them to write this without a giant asterisk.
Funny, that's the exact deal with have with guns - we accept some amount of mass child murder as the cost of the 2nd Amendment.
Another datapoint that the 2nd is now considered more absolute the 1st.
Except that every big kiddie porn case was cracked by old-fashioned policework--"Get someone inside". And, most of the time, it isn't even that difficult to pull off.
It particularly grinds my gears because the powers that be only trot out kiddie porn when they want to shove legislation down our throats. The rest of the time enforcement against kiddie porn stays heavily underfunded.
I don’t understand - it never ended. In fact, Obama ran on a platform of protecting whistleblowers and cracking down on government overreach. But, once he took office, he legalized the Presidential Surveillance Program that Snowden whistleblew and doubled down on pursuing Snowden.
This is not how I’d articulate it. We tolerate some terrible things because trying to stop them would be even worse. There are really bad people out there. Unfortunately those bad people can also run for office and/or get hired on to 3 letter agencies.
A pedophile with a camera is less dangerous than a senator without the 4th amendment. A racist on social media is less dangerous than a president without the first amendment.
Fascism doesn’t happen because you elect a fascist president. The seeds of fascism had to be sown long before that. Fascism is the result of eroding protections designed to prevent a leader from over-reaching. The path to fascism is paved in good intentions.
I'd add that the solution to child abuse and terrorism is the same it has ever been, i.e. targeted investigations relying on tactics like infiltration of criminal rings with undercover officers. There's no justification for Gestapo/NKVD authoritarianism and mass surveillance tactics.
However, there doesn't seem to be any plausible way to communicate with others using any infrastructure-type system (from postal mail to fiber optic cable) that doesn't reveal the network of communication (i.e. metadata), and Tor is hardly an exception. Tor seems to have been designed to allow remote government agents (aka spies) operating in hostile environments a means to communicate with a known base of operations without revealing their actual remote locations or identity. Similarly it could be used by individuals to communicate with journalists (as Edward Snowden did) without revealing their identity or location, but only if they take a lot of precautions (i.e. not using their device for any other online activity that could be traced to them). I imagine NSA has backdoors into almost all Tor nodes anyway. The content can be securely encrypted, but location/identity? Probably not.
Big MAMAA
I'd wager if you scraped most news publications you'd see Meta used across the board, Google used in most cases and a few cases where the writer uses "Alphabet, Google's parent company..." (https://thehill.com/policy/technology/3503534-activists-work...) which IMHO just proves the point I'm trying to make
For the perfect exhibit, look no further than this Tech Crunch article with the headline "Meta and Google's Gradient..." https://techcrunch.com/2022/05/26/meta-and-google-gradient-i...
I think many people are missing the point and see the issue as "Governments trying to get capabilities".
No, they always had the capability because of lower population, slower communication, more effective mass media and information bubbles. Now, they're losing this capability, and want to keep their abilities while making them automated & cheaper.
Also, there's CryptoAG stuff, which is the same thing, but international.
The real cost (or long-term benefit) is you'll need a bit more local storage to have your cake and eat it privately.
I mean, this is what email has basically come to. I've tried to host my own email server, all my outbound mail ends up in spam. If you want privacy, use PGP
Edit: please don't downvote this parent comment, I think it is still a pretty reasonable concern
That's almost never what actually happens, though. They sell access to you and use your data internally to target ads.
A law enforcement request does literally release your data.
It's not even the surveillance that I am concerned with at this point. I just am trying to disentangle all these services that I use that demand to become linked in difficult ways.
Like let's say you have a gmail account linked to a youtube account, and you upload a video or like something that sets off google's automated spam heuristic. Boom, your google account is deleted and you can no longer access your email or sign into your accounts that require email verification. All this extra surveillance is just going to increase the odds of my account getting falsely flagged as a bot or something.
Let's say you lose your phone. You have to use your phone to login to some institution's service, so you get a new phone and try to reset the 2FA with your email. However you need access to your phone as a 2FA to access your email. (this exact scenario happened to a family member the other day, just goes to show you should NEVER link your accounts with a cell number).
Okay, but it does matter when you say something significant that isn't true. Do you understand that?
No they don't.
>We do not scan or read your Gmail messages to show you ads
The court order that Proton complied with released the IP address of the suspect, not the encrypted contents of the emails in the suspects inbox.
The value IS that they simply don't have that much data. All your emails are encrypted at rest with a key they can't read. All your data is stored in such a way that they can't decrypt it on demand.
Think about it. When Microsoft gets served a FISMA warrant, everything they have is stored in plaintext, so they have to hand it all over. With Proton, all they have is your IP, the date you created your account, the last login date, potentially the subject lines of any messages in their mail queue, and that's about it.
Nobody is going to risk their business to help people hide from law enforcement, and anybody that says they will is probably lying to you.
Can you provide me the name of any company who does not comply court orders of the country it operates in and continues to operate freely?
Edit: I thought this was a more than fair question, evidently people do not think so.
AT&T, Google, Apple, Comcast, Verizon, ...
Oh, did you mean companies who refuse to comply specifically to legal inquiries about their users or customers? No company will (or even should) stick their neck out for you personally.
With sufficient resources and clout, they will risk it for themselves because $$$ and power.
Really? I understand that they fight court orders when they feel they need to, which Proton at least claims to do as well (have not verified that, though), but they get away with just... ignoring them? Or not complying after losing an appeal? I stand corrected if that is the case.
>With sufficient resources and clout
Does Proton have the clout to do so? I don't believe they do, which makes me wonder why it's such an unpopular opinion to believe exactly what you said ("No company will (or even should) stick their neck out for you personally.") when it comes to Proton.
Corporations and their employees have learned clever techniques to get away with "complying" without really complying in instances where they're sufficiently motivated. It's not always politically feasible, but is in many cases.
A quick (and ironic) Google search for "google lawsuit federal compliance" turns up many instances:
https://www.dol.gov/newsroom/releases/ofccp/ofccp20170104
https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/justice-department-sues-monop...
These violations are all calculated risks on their part. Internally, they intentionally keep certain communications off of email to ensure it will never be discoverable through a legal process.
It's not like Big-G is the only one, do you think this is ubiquitously commonplace across the megacorps in virtually every industry in the United States?
Here's what happens when they come for your / our data:
https://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/20/technology/google-resists...
> even as three of its competitors agreed to provide information
> Rather than seeking data on individuals, it says it is trying to establish a profile of Internet use that will help it defend the Child Online Protection Act, a 1998 law that would impose tough criminal penalties on individuals whose Web sites carried material deemed harmful to minors.
The last Protonmail UI update was just new styles, but still as clunky as before.
But I didn't try the new phone apps, they were really bad in the past.
Evidence points to ProtonVPN being a white-labeled version of Nord VPN. Source: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23571653 and https://archive.is/iZ2l2 (archive of relevant but broken [2] link @ HN thread)
Protonmail has its own issues that have been discussed on HN. Source: https://encryp.ch/blog/disturbing-facts-about-protonmail/
Obviously Gmail and such are piped directly into global intelligence databases, but Proton is not a panacea, and no guarantee they aren't compromised themselves.
Wait --- 'obviously'?!? Do you have any info on this because that is a wild claim.
Not only has the concept and implementation of automated law enforcement portals been around since the 90s, the Snowden docs revealed that major providers were providing such portals. AND that their inter-datacenter communications were being piped directly into global intelligence databases without.
These portals, NSLs, and other mechanisms have also been codified into law for over a decade, and their existence is extremely well documented as well as reinforced.
It sounds like a wild claim, but unfortunately, it is extremely based in reality. And, it's so well documented that to be ignorant of it at this point is akin to incompetence.
(Disclaimer, employee of Google, my opinions are my own and all that. I have no info beyond what is public knowledge.)
It was recently reported that major tech companies (including Google) release user data without warrants, and without even authenticating the party requesting the data: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30842757
I'll be honest, this is really the first time I've seen a tech circle in which this whole surveillance apparatus is not a common established knowledge.
well, they were. without google's consent :) past tense, obviously
> XKeyscore (XKEYSCORE or XKS) is a secret computer system used by the United States National Security Agency (NSA) for searching and analyzing global Internet data
> XKeyscore is a complicated system, and various authors have different interpretations of its actual capabilities. Edward Snowden and Glenn Greenwald explained XKeyscore as being a system which enables almost unlimited surveillance of anyone anywhere in the world, while the NSA has said that usage of the system is limited and restricted.
Think about that for a split second: anyone, anywhere. Also, who would you trust more: the US government, or a man who sacrificed his life, health and wellbeing to expose this scandal to the world?
Alas, privacy for the masses is dead.
I’ll concede that this isn’t much better evidence than the links you provided, but that archived site in your comment really doesn’t read like a reputable source of truth, either.
Direct link:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17258203
The allegations have been retracted.
- How can ProtonVPN be free and why is it in Lithuania?
- Why does a Swiss privacy company get EU funding if the EU wants to erode privacy all the time?
- Why is a cell phone number required for registration?
- In general, how do they make money? Other free providers like gmx are full of cheesy advertisements.
How do you figure? Google actively scans both email and drive for CSAM. If they can scan it for CSAM, they can scan it for whatever the hell they want.