The requests were made under the guise of anti-terrorism laws
Remember this the next time someone in government says “We need tough anti-terrorism laws”. They also get to define what counts as terrorism, so anyone inconvenient can be destroyed and the public told “We’re just keeping you safe from terrorism.”
nothing I read about this group on Wikipedia points to terrorism, it repeatedly says they advocate nonviolence
I guess these days though it's become some kind of magic password to get whatever the hell you want
Well, basque indepence movement involved several deaths, including “civilians”, non politics or police related until 2000s, and people react quite pacific always.
Whereas catalan movement is basically pacifist with some roadblocks and protests and some riots. In front, the typical anti riot police, not fun… but kind of expected.
Honestly, I will be not surprised if this case ends in nothing as it is not clear it can hold in court …
Proton upheld their claim of privacy, no Emails were disclosed. But they never promised anonymity cause that’s something they simply can’t do under the Swiss law. If you willingly give them your other mail addresses or contact details, they have to comply. Sure they could have denied the Spanish authorities, but it takes less than a week to get a court order for things like this.
They do in certain cases. If you sign up through a VPN or Tor, they require you to provide a recovery email. They don’t accept temporary email addresses, and even if you don’t sign up work a VPN, they’ll still collect and be obligated to hand over your IP
Google doesn’t sell your data because they don’t need to. They take the data and use something called Real Time Bidding that also skirts GDPR and data protection laws/best practices.
People in this thread are really showing their ass about how little they know about how their data is actually being collected and protected. Sure, Proton isn’t 100% private, but to say Proton and Gmail are on the same levels of consumer protection is hilarious.
I don’t think that Proton sells my data to advertisers or trains AI using my emails and documents. As of laws, unfortunately any service in any reputable country has to obey them. You can always buy a server in some banana republic and set up an email service there, but even then there are some risks.
With Proton’s anti-privacy requirements for establishing service, they don’t deserve anyone’s trust. They’re just a LEO honeypot that charges you to get in. Again, in that regard, you may as well stick with free Google. At least they’re (mostly) honest about what they are.
How is proton being dishonest here? I’d like to read your point. They never pitched themselves as a way to protect yourself from the law, they always clearly said they are a confidential email provider, meaning they don’t know what you are sending and receiving. It works like a doctor meeting, the information is very confidential, but not anonymous, it is tied to you even though nobody except authorized parties should be able to access this info.
Evidence? I’ll stipulate Google’s culpability. I never said that Gmail is better than Proton just that there’s not a lot of difference between them, Proton fanbois’ protestations to the contrary notwithstanding.
The evidence is in the article above. They don’t cooperate with police requests for information, they only comply with legal orders from the Swiss judicial system. Google on the other hand not only works directly with police, but has been known to initiate contact with police, handing over the contents of entire accounts unprompted.
Then there’s the fact that the metadata supplied by Proton in this case isn’t even required to use the platform. It’s an optional feature a user can opt into for usability, at the expense of a little anonymity.
The differences between Proton and other providers like Google are immense. Proton can’t hand over the contents of your account because they don’t even have access to it. Google on the other hand has total access to all your data that they regularly abuse for profit, and will gladly hand over the entirety of to law enforcement. After all, the headline as posted to Lemmy here is misleading. The user wasn’t found out due to Proton, they were found out due to Apple. There’s your difference right there. They couldn’t do anything with the information they got from Proton directly, they had to link it to a different service that unlike Proton, handed over all the users information.
Google can and will share not only metadata, but the full content of all data you have stored on Google servers, including emails, files, and photos. Proton on the other hand can’t share your emails, files or photos with anyone, even if they wanted to.
Here’s one of a few cases where Google’s AI will analyze all photos and files you’ve uploaded to Google photos, google drive, or sent/received via Gmail, and can automatically close your account and will report you to authorities. In this particular case, after being alerted by Google, local authorities investigated and found that no crime had occurred. Yet they never restored access to his account. Proton once again doesn’t even have access to the content of the files you upload to their drive offering.
The differences between these two companies are inarguably vast. Suggesting otherwise is absurd. Yet accounts like yours fight tooth and nail to spread misinformation to discredit privacy-centric service companies. Makes me wonder what your real motives are, because privacy is not one of them.
I don’t. If I have something to share that could get me killed, I send it through an actual secure channel or I just say it in person. Fortunately, I don’t have such important information in my possession. :)
@CaptObvious
No, not "for the asking" but only on court order. And they even challenge those, see transparency report.
And targeted advertising be the lesser evil? I beg to differ.
Google combines everything they know from tracking you. And that's a lot if you don't fight against it. I for one had two evil experiences with them: (German): https://www.pc-fluesterer.info/wordpress/vorbeugen/e-mail/e-mail-und-privatsphaere/ (further links inside).
And you have nothing to hide?
Oh well.
Spanish police asked for a court order which was apparently easy to get. So yes, for the asking.
I never said I have nothing to hide. I said I don’t trust any online service to keep it a secret. And if it’s really important, I sure as hell won’t send it on a postcard (email).
Way way better than gmail IMO. One simple reason is if you have something wrong with your account you can get in contact with a real human. And still better data protection than anything in the US. I’m not a journalist or freedom fighter so for my use case it’s ideal.
They could avoid storing the recovery email in plaintext. A hash would be sufficient if they require the user to enter their recovery email for confirmation when they really need to recover the account.
For an ostensibly privacy-oriented service, Proton makes some weird architectural choices.
The person is a terrorist by definition and Proton does allow temp addresses simply because they cant enforce that you don’t just set up a SMTP server on your pc and get a temporary mail from that…
They are privacy focused but you don’t have to use their services for committing treason and plan terrorist actions/actions against a state when you are to dumb to not use your go to email as recovery.
@CaptObvious@Mikufan if the user practiced proper opsec it wouldn’t be an issue. Proton provides privacy not anonymity. Those are 2 different things. The second requires opsec in the users end.
@CaptObvious Proton never claims to provide anonymity though. They even state that it depends on proper opsec. It was the user fault for proving an email as a recovery that led to a more “willing” company that gave his data to police. If they had never done that, it would be a different situation.
Anonymity is an aspect of privacy. Arguably, it is even expected. Proton pat themselves on the back about privacy without being honest about what that includes. They even have a blog post victim-blaming when their “privacy” marketing is shown to be false.
Admittedly, I don’t like Proton. They were far too quick to try to jump in bed with the Chinese Communist Party when Google was kicked out. It left a bad taste. I’ve seen absolutely nothing in the years since to make me question that position.
@CaptObvious can definitely be an aspect of privacy but privacy ≠ anonymity. Proton explicitly states this. They arnt going to disobey law, which they also state. I don’t see what the issue is here? They obeyed the law and the user made a mistake on there end. Proton didn’t do anything wrong or tricky
Fair question. For everyday, run-of-the-mill, don’t-care-who-sees-it, a postcard is fine; I have a Gmail account for those. For anything more sensitive, I have a couple of Tuta accounts. If it’s truly confidential, I prefer to just say it in person.
Yeah, that’s one of the complaints I have about them. Of course, if I need PGP, I prefer to encrypt an attachment myself offline and just send that, so it’s not a dealbreaker in my case.
Out of curiosity, and if you don’t mind my asking, which provider do you use?
@CaptObvious I currently use proton as my main provider. I still have a gmail and iCloud as well as some accounts haven’t been transferred over yet, but those pretty much just get used for 2fa codes until I switch them
They could host themselves in a different place with better privacy laws. I’ve always wondered why, for example, don’t privacy services establish themselves in international waters or in micronations such as Sealand.
Because Proton is part of CERN and the privacy laws in Switzerland are very strict. They just have to hand over stuff for very certain cases, terrorism and treason being such cases.
but “muh terrorism” is such a wildcard that it can be (and is) used to excuse anything, so that’s pretty much the same as saying that Proton does not offer any guarantee at all.
Sounds like an avoidable problem, that Proton didn’t have a whole lot to fight it with. Obviously they could/should have fought it in court, but this could have been avoided if the individual simply didn’t link a recovery email and/or didn’t share the same email across Apple products + protesting. Although, the article does point out that if you sign up over Tor or a VPN it requires a verification email, which sucks- though you could just use a temporary email address to get around it. As CaptObvious pointed out (literally @CaptObvious lmfao) the reporter pointed out Proton rejects temporary emails.
Key information:
The core of the controversy stems from Proton Mail providing the Spanish police with the recovery email address associated with the Proton Mail account of an individual
individual is suspected of being a member of the Mossos d’Esquadra (Catalonia’s police force) and of using their internal knowledge to assist the Democratic Tsunami movement.
Upon receiving the recovery email from Proton Mail, Spanish authorities further requested Apple to provide additional details linked to that email, leading to the identification of the individual.
This case is particularly noteworthy because […] complex interplay between technology firms, user privacy, and law enforcement.
requests were made under the guise of anti-terrorism laws
primary activities of the Democratic Tsunami involving protests and roadblocks
Proton Mail’s compliance with these requests is bound by Swiss law
Comment from Proton:
We are aware of the Spanish terrorism case involving alleged threats to the King of Spain, but as a general rule we do not comment on specific cases. Proton has minimal user information, as illustrated by the fact that in this case data obtained from Apple was used to identify the terrorism suspect. Proton provides privacy by default and not anonymity by default because anonymity requires certain user actions to ensure proper OpSec, such as not adding your Apple account as an optional recovery method. Note, Proton does not require adding a recovery address as this information can in theory be turned over under Swiss court order, as terrorism is against the law in Switzerland.
I mean, suit yourself if you insist that you can or only want to do it with a throwaway. I'm saying you can do it with similar services like tutanota as the failover address, eliminating the need for a throwaway.
My bad. I thought Tuta also required a verification email when I created an account several years ago. Just tried it, and they don’t appear to these days. Good to know. Thanks.
I don’t know if what I do is the right way around this but, as stated Proton will reject disposable verification emails and you cannot use another proton account to verify a new one.
My workaround for this is to verify proton with a Tutanota account which is also created with as little to no identifiable information as possible.
TLDR: Proton accepts Tuta emails for verification and Tuta emails can be created anonymously.
Valid point. I do prefer the UI with Proton, I find it nicer to click through. Also, Tuta usually makes you wait 2-3 days before you can use it - not a big deal really, unless you’re trying to sign up for something new.
Other than not requiring a second email address linked to their service, being covered by German rather than Swiss law, actually fighting back against information requests, and not sucking up to the Chinese Communist Party, Tuta is probably fairly similar. Those differences, though, are persuasive.
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