Hacker News Reader

Comment by 0daystock | Hacker News Reader

Asserting "private email" is a modern litmus test for someone's technical understanding and capabilities, or lack thereof. Snake oil companies will always hide behind "it's encrypted" and "it's hosted in Switzerland" tropes that mean nothing to anyone who has done a modicum of research. Real privacy is not the result of some product, especially not when its so desperately and obviously shilled.

View on HN

Its the best you can get. Its fully end-to-end encrypted when stored, they don't scan anything, no ADs, no tracking, and they support laws and organization that improve individuals privacy.

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.

Thanks for stating this. It's still good to have people working on tools to help us have better usable solutions though.

Depending who is your enemy (threat model), I guess proton tools can help you protect your intimacy though.

Are you suggesting that because the only way to have truly private email (in the U.S. at least), is to own the server hardware, the property it's colocated on, and the Internet connection. Because this is true, but not helpful.

There isn't such a thing as "secure/private email" because its design was not conceived with such things even in mind. The "secure" solutions like Protonmail are something other than email, which is probably the way forward, but I wish it was done without twisting language giving others a false sense of security and understanding.

I'm more thinking "legally private" than "technically private".

How can I learn more about privacy online.

It seems to me that the only private email would be no email.

Threat modeling is the only logical way to reason about privacy and security. It is quite a tedious exercise of listing all the adversaries you're worried about, their capabilities, and data they want to compromise. Such a model will reveal gaps and additional controls you can implement to improve your state.

>Snake oil companies will always hide behind "it's encrypted" and "it's hosted in Switzerland" tropes that mean nothing to anyone who has done a modicum of research.

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.

> Do you have evidence that Proton does not actually encrypt their emails?

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.

It seems rather harsh to brand them as pure snake oil based on a hypothetical situation that applies to basically every single piece of software and hardware ever invented, but fair enough.

I like to see it as an unsolved problem. Similar to when Diffie and Hellman revolutionized cryptography with the concept of public/private keys, I like to think that one day, a revolutionary proof will drop that demonstrates a true trustless privacy model where backdooring isn't even a remote possibility.

I suppose you always have to trust someone. (I'm not the one who branded them as snake oil, BTW)

What does "encrypting" an email mean to you? If a Gmail user contacts me on Protonmail and Protonmail "encrypts" the message to me after receipt - what problem have we solved?

I wonder why you used quotes around encryption? They encrypt the email. That very obviously does not mean Proton somehow encrypted the sent email in the senders Gmail account.

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 think the point of contention is exactly how obvious this is to most Protonmail users. I worry too many read "it's encrypted" and make dangerous assumptions about what can actually be guaranteed rather than investigating first-hand; this is the real risk of such services, in my opinion.

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.

I absolutely agree that the marketing and branding around almost every service that either does (or claims to) promote privacy and security leaves a lot to be desired.

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.

> Do you have evidence that Proton does not actually encrypt their emails?

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.

>Subject, From, To, etc. are not.

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.

Couldn't have said it better myself! Privacy is first and foremost a discipline and a practice, just like security. It's a form of self-respect, in my eyes. Some would say it's even a natural human right.

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.

I don’t know. I don’t think all “commoditization” of privacy is a bad thing. WhatsApp commoditized it, Signal; SSL/TLS; Tor; Privacy Coins; these all vastly improved the privacy of comms on the planet. One needs to determine outcomes rather than declaring it app disasters.

maybe democratizing privacy is a better way to phrase than commoditization — which implies some cost savings rather than the just consumer availability.

Thanks for chiming in. I've been having some difficulty expressing my thoughts lately so sometimes I don't make the most sense.

Yes, I definitely agree with you--democratization is a much better way to put it.

Please write and express yourself! You made sense to me and I wanted to add the conversation. I’ve thrown around many crazy ideas and the best ones seem to stir conversation and evolve or die. Ideas are better discussed in a room with many dissenting opinions.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com