Awesome…
Proton was legally ordered by the Swiss justice department to hand over the (severely limited) information about a law breaking organization’s account. They had paid for Proton using a credit card instead of the anonymous payment methods Proton offers, and that is what Proton was forced to hand over. It was the organization’s bad OpSec, not Proton willingly deanonymizing users.
Hopefully people like you will be able to nip this in the bud before yet another joke of a controversy starts…
You must be new here…
On the one hand, I really like how often Proton’s shortcomings are highlighted. This SHOULD be a wake up call that you should never rely on a company to protect you and should instead focus on what you can do to ptorect yourself. And Proton… actually are pretty good in that regard. Connect from a burner/live image computer over public wifi using tor (or something similar) and their free accounts are STILL the gold standard for journalism and whistleblowers.
But the problem is that people are stupid and lazy (and many outlets actively benefit from "Eww, proton is bad. If only they had paid for NordVPN to really protect them from the FBI! ~Note, NordVPN provides no guarantees of protection~ ". So we just get stupidity.
OP’s title certainly doesn’t help.
Why do you think Proton stores the association between accounts and payment identity?
Many privacy-oriented companies actually accept credit card payments and simply don’t store that information.
answer:
proton is snake oil
Yeah, I am no fan of proton and they have lied before (no log VPN logs magically finding logs for authorities and then later removing the no-log claim).
But this is literally just proton being legally compelled to hand over data the user willingly gave (not being harvested or de-encrypted). A nothing story.
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B…But…Swiss evil?
Some people in the comment section are really dumb switching to other alternatives thinking that Proton isn’t trustworthy because they gave the information despite the organisation not using anonymous currency. What’s ironic is that some of these people are switching to those alternatives where you can’t even use anonymous currency.
Also, kind of a clickbait title.
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Proton did some PR for Trump a while ago that didn’t get them on everyones good side.
Not this again…
For one, it was Andy Yen, posting on his personal rather than from Proton’s account.
Second, if you follow the money, Andy Yen and Proton donates a lot of money to liberal organizations. They also campaign for Democrats actually.
The downfall of this is all because he thought Gail Slater would be a good pick and the entirety of the privacy community thought he undid all of his privacy advocacy and foundation overnight.
You really want to give your email provider your phone number. “Privacy” for instances that assemble botnets and block VPNs doesn’t even include avoiding metadata collection. You guys are simply very salty and lazy that the best-advertised options are all connected to NATO intelligence agencies. Which really should be obvious to any person that hasn’t thrown their intuition in the garbage due to its interference with their entertainment. You really bought the Swiss Nazi neutrality ploy, closing in on a century past its expiration date. Is this not bleak?
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They gave payment data to the authorities, because, guess what, they HAVE to provide whatever is subpoenaed. Did they provide emails, IP addresses? Doesn’t say any of that. There’s the option of paying with crypto, but the imbeciles that know they are going to be at risk of being found, paid with a credit or debit card.
404 media is more of the same sensationalism laden bullshit out there. Make a fucking Strom out of a drop of water.
just really sad to call yourself a privacy company and then feed your customer to the gestapo
people can end up as embarrassing footnotes in history a number of different ways, but being a dishonest coward company in the privacy sphere is basically speedrunning it
Use monero.
article in case you can’t read it:
lemmy.ml/post/44086795edit: better link in a reply.proton coulda put up a fight, a loud one, for optics sake if nothing else. rolling over on any (and by implication, all) request should be the last straw in their long line of snafus; by way of “death by a thousand cuts”, I would never entrust them with anything of importance.
signal demonstrated that you could decouple payment info from user data and a shop that touts the privacy part of their offerings coulda at least mimic such a thing.
edit 2: fuck any and all pay-with-crypto shills and the horse they rode in on.
article in case you can’t read it: https://lemmy.ml/post/44086795
that link only has two paragraphs of the article; there are 8 more in the full article here on archive.org
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Being secure online and being anonymous online is not the same. Proton only promises one of those.
They have a .onion site. Use it always.
And don’t pay with a credit card if you’re committing crimes lmao
Long Live Tutamail and using a duckduckgo.com address as a backup!
I just switched from proton to mailbox. Mailbox gives you a say so over what happens when law enforcement asks for your account info.
Mailbox.org doesn’t have the option for anonymous payments beyond payments in cash, which was the reason for the article in the first place.
It does t matter if you have the ability to simply delete all of your account info.
It doesn’t matter if they keep it anyways. Always assume anything you put on someone else’s servers is there forever.
Is there any private way to have emails forwarded from a service like GMail to Proton? I know you could forward to an alias on the Proton account, or alternatively forward through a third party (which you would then have to also trust), but I want to hear from people who know more on the topic than me.
Private from what? Google sees the forwarded emails anyway.
Yes, that’s basically what I was getting at. So it sounds like as long as Google knows the account emails are being forwarded to (can see the headers) there is no notion of privacy.
The way email forwarding works is: email is being received in full (by Google in your case), they look up processing rules, and send a copy to your Proton account, then optionally delete it.
The only thing you protect yourself from this way is Google knowing your IP address every time you check email. They have seen the contents and all headers of forwarded messages.
