I heard people claim for some time that Proton supports the Trump administration. I’ve only ever really seen the claim made based on a single tweet.
This person did a pretty deep dive and comes to the conclusion that they don’t, nor does their CEO.
I’m not saying I know what’s in that guy’s head, nor do I want to. But I’m wary of coming to an extreme conclusion about someone because of a couple of sentences that person wrote online.
https://io.waxandleather.com/users/alisynthesis/statuses/115245340493250991
There’s a lot more to distrust about Proton than one tweet. For example, they assisted a fascist government persecution of environmental activists.
I don’t know a ton about that situation, but if you stick to the facts and stop going off wild speculation (like so many here love to do), you can start to understand the “why”. The accounts weren’t even deleted. They were, in fact, reinstated.
Look at it through the lens of Occam’s Razor:
Which of those is more likely?
The only facts we know:
That’s it. That’s all we have.
If I ran an email server that provided encrypted email, knowing that potentially malicious actors could be using it, and I was informed of potentially malicious activity by an organization that specifically deals with that kind of thing; I would preemptively block those accounts as well. You would too; don’t lie to yourself.
My guess is that Proton probably has a policy or something in place preventing their “normal” support from communicating with an owner of an account(s) that is blocked due to reports of potentially malicious activity, until an investigation is completed. Which would explain why Proton took the “shoot first ask questions later” approach. And then when they’re inevitably called out by the owner in question, who turned out to be a non-malicious person, that’s probably when the case reached the attention of Proton leadership.
I think they were meaning the case when they were handing over information to the french authorities for an investigation about a journalist. but I can’t blame them for that, they do not stand above the law. if they didn’t comply they would have been sued or shut down
Oh, was that the of where they handed over just an IP address because that’s all they had?
yeah I think.
but to be fair that’s not all they have. as I know mail titles are not encrypted either, maybe attachments too but not sure about that.
Not exactly but yes. And that was another case where Proton did a sorta unforced error, not to mention they basically confirmed that they can associate and profile people across accounts. Which already puts an important dent on their claims about privacy.