Awesome…
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ITT people who believe you have to comply with government orders and call themselves anarchists
Oh boy, their man fawning over Trump is aging like fine milk.
Proton the company that prides itself protecting privacy when it is literally the law of the country they are in. It is like a cabby advertising that they have license and insurance.
Protón don’t promise anonymity If you use your credit card to pay protón services. Maybe he has to learn more about OPSEC. 🤷♂️
Please, using crypto alone isn’t going to do shit. The barrier to entry for truly anonymous usage is not something most people will ever accomplish.
Privacy is effectively dead but yet we have a company trying to advertise about it. Proton has always been marketing garbage meant to attract people’s money.
Garbage company with no ethics other than taking care of their pocket book.
You’re mixing up privacy and anonymity. Encryption alone doesn’t make you anonymous — that’s true — but Proton never claimed it would. Their promise is that email content is end-to-end encrypted, which is why they can’t hand over the messages themselves.
In the case reported by 404 Media, the identification came from payment information, not from breaking encryption. If you pay with a credit card, your identity is already tied to the account. That would happen with any service under a legal jurisdiction.
The real takeaway isn’t that Proton is “garbage”, it’s that most people misunderstand what encryption actually protects.
I was talking about both. The fact that Proton exists as a middle man to expose a customer is the reality of the situation. Do you think they score points for blaming their customer!? I really have a hard time dealing with shills for corporations.
The real takeaway is the way Proton advertised itself was a fucking lie and now they have to spend all their time back peddling while shills like you do PR for them.
Garbage company with to leaders who say stupid shit about politics they don’t understand and make idle threats to their own government saying they are going to move like the little fascist bitches they are.
Proton didn’t “expose” the user by breaking encryption. According to the reporting, the identification came from payment information, which any company legally has to keep and can be compelled to provide under a court order. The email content remained encrypted.
This isn’t unique to Proton — any service operating under a legal jurisdiction is a potential middleman if it stores identifiable data. That’s exactly why anonymity requires Tor, anonymous payments, and strict OPSEC, not just encrypted email.
So the real lesson isn’t that encryption is fake; it’s that privacy tools don’t automatically give anonymity, and many people expect them to.
Proton, if it cared, could have taken any number of steps to mitigate this problem. Like I said, they created a false image of what they provided to the public and have been back peddling ever since. I get it you don’t see it that way and that you don’t view yourself as a shill.
You’re still confusing two completely different things: privacy and anonymity. Encryption protects the content of messages, not every piece of metadata around an account. Proton has always been clear about that.
In the 404 Media case, the identification came from payment information, not from Proton breaking encryption. If someone pays with a credit card, their identity is already tied to the account. That would happen with any provider under legal jurisdiction.
Honestly, the way you’re framing this suggests you don’t really understand how encryption, metadata, and OPSEC work. Encryption ≠ anonymity. Anyone who actually works in security knows that.
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
I never trusted ProtonMail. Right when you sign up, you’re constantly bombarded with advertisements to upgrade to pro. They’re plastered everywhere with obnoxious banners.
I get that they’re a business and they need money to operate, but the ads are so obnoxiously “in your face” that in my mind their priority isn’t your privacy, it’s your money.
Tutamail is the better service.
They’re a paid service with a free tier — of course they promote upgrades. That’s literally how freemium products work.
But ads for a paid plan don’t suddenly mean the privacy model is fake. By that logic every privacy service with a free tier would be “untrustworthy.”
If you prefer Tuta, fine — but pretending Proton exists only to grab money is a pretty shallow take.
How’s Tutamail any better than Proton Mail? Help me understand. And if Tutamail’s priority is not your money, then what is it? There’s no such thing as a free thing after all (?).
Plus, the owner of Proton said that Trump also did good things.
That was the straw that broke the camel’s back.
Long Live Tutamail and using a duckduckgo.com address as a backup!
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.
This instance really wants to dislike Proton.
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?
It’s an observation. Who’s salty? Source me every one of your claims as it pertains to Proton.
Literally a reply from a block of salt.
Who? them or me? I just wanted to see where the user was getting their claims from because they leveled a lot of shitty assumptions my way for no reason and I just wanted to learn.
So salty then.
Lol. Guess so. Thanks for the laugh.
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.
I will always be a amazed at the bootlicking this company produces.
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.
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.
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
Recurring payments I think
Another comment linked to a reddit post where Proton explained what happened.
Yeah, the credit card was on file for recurring payments.
Really, this headline should be “Organization so poorly organized that they messed up having relatively secure email.”
Not at all. Proton doesn’t require any personal info at all. But if you pay with a credit card… That has your personal info tied to it. It’s their fuck up paying with a credit card. Proton accepts other payment methods that aren’t tied to your identity.
Proton is required by law to provide information they have when the courts say so.
Are they required to keep the data?
Not sure about Swiss laws regarding merchant payment card data retention… But they aren’t really going to matter with this situation either way. Even if Proton doesn’t keep any identifying information directly, the payment processor for sure is going to keep identifying data. Proton will have a confirmation number for the payment being processed, which can be correlated via the payment processor anyway.
So I’m not a criminal organization as far as I know, but if I did pay with a credit card originally can that be rectified without deleting and starting over?
Proton uses Chargebee for payments, which has its own data retention policy of essentially “as long as we want to”, but Proton does themselves keep limited data like the billing name, and last 4 digits.
Proton’s privacy policy says nothing about a pre-set time delay after which they’d delete that data. They only claim that they “reserve our right” to remove your payment information if they think it’s no longer valid. So theoretically, that might mean if your card’s expiry date has passed, but that’s not a confirmation.
The best way to reliably make sure Proton wouldn’t have any info on you is to not have ever tied any real information about yourself or your payment info to that account.
Thank you for the information.
Yeah, exactly. They don’t make it hard to not tie personal data to them if you want, you just have to actually DO the thing to take advantage of it. These people seemed to think it was magic, which seems to be how a lot of people think Proton or Tuta works.
B…But…Swiss evil?
@Charger8232 @jrcruciani The bug is between keyboard and chair. It is always a problem to use crédit card.
I like services like PIA that let you pay in gift cards.
Owned by Kape technologies, and uses Google analytics. Big nope. Any VPN service worth its money support anon payments (including gift cards) anyways.
Does Proton Mail?
Yup
Is there a link you could share?
I don’t see any anonymous payment methods on this page.
Tuta has a 3rd party provider that you can send cash or Monero to and get a gift card to pay for your account.
Mullvad will directly take cash and Monero.
I don’t see anything suggesting that Proton does anything similar
Gift cards don’t work for me. Guess I need one ordered from outside the US.
Mullvad accepts cash.
And Monero.
Use monero.
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.
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.
You cannot put up a fight when ordered to do something by a judge who has jurisdiction over you. You either comply or you’re committing a crime.
I imagine they got courts and lawyers and motions and hearings and stuff over there, even if the fight is doomed you need to show your teeth once in a while. and what’s with the proton employee reviewing whether there were “explosives” and “guns” involved, naturally based on super-reliable evidence, what the fuck is that?!
and alla that aside, why do they have payment and user info on file, for what fucking purpose? there’s either user privacy or there ain’t. and them folks are in the “ain’t” camp.
I imagine they got courts and lawyers and motions and hearings and stuff over there, even if the fight is doomed you need to show your teeth once in a while.
That’s not how it works. They can’t just refuse to comply with a lawful order from a judge. They could be put in actual jail. This affects all email providers.
what is this take based on? there’s a direct line between “we want this shit done” and “judge rubberstamps order”? no process, no interview, no hearing, no nothings? medieval courts maybe worked that way, no system of government I know of nowadays does.
Every single government works this way. Court orders are not optional.
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
They have a .onion site. Use it always.
And don’t pay with a credit card if you’re committing crimes lmao
Being secure online and being anonymous online is not the same. Proton only promises one of those.
I’ve been a paid protonmail user for years. What should I use instead?
Create a new account in Tor Browser. Pay with monero.
Never link your old account to your new account. Never write your name. Never email anyone off proton mail, unless you setup PGP first. Never login to your new account in a browser other than Tor Browser.
Proton is the best option, but tech can’t fix stupid.
If you don’t give information to Proton AG which they can be legally forced to hand over, you’re alright.
I’m not saying Proton was right or wrong to hand over data, who knows how much if a fight they really out up, but it seems more like an OpSec thing, where they found the account because they used that email to create a user account somewhere that they then posted about being a part of this group rhe FBI was going after.
I’d say your best bet to avoid this would be to create a free account that doesn’t have any payment info and doesn’t use your premium account as a recovery method of any kind if you’re going to use it as the email associated with a social media account. Or like someone else mentioned, if there’s an anonymous payment method, always use that.
Again, not a great look for Proton, but doesn’t really go against any of their claims as far as data encryption is concerned. Not sure if they could encrypt that payment info.
Your technical and legal understanding seems limited. I personally work in the IT space and am a hobbyist in legal matters, in particular data protection.
I’m pretty sure there was nothing they could’ve legally done to protect the payment information.
It’s not a “bad look” for Proton; instead, it’s just people being confronted with reality.
If you commit a crime, law enforcement will be after you, and if your operational security sucks, there will be no service that can counter that.
If you’re worried Proton could identify you to authorities, either just make a new Proton account and pay anonymously (cryptocurrency or cash by mail), since that’s the only way this person was identified, or you could use what I’d consider to be the next-best, which is Tuta.
Nowhere near as slick a UI, less overall offerings (only email and calendar), but it costs less and generally provides similar security and privacy to Proton. Though again, you’d have to pay via private means, otherwise you’re gonna get identified by the same mechanism this person was if the government really decided to come after you by your account.
this person said it once, but I’ll say it again.
the same thing can happen on Tuta unless you pay with an anonymous method. these are privacy focused email providers, they are not anonymous email providers. they keep as little data on you as they need, but if you’re paying with a credit card then obviously you have your real name tied to the account.
Posteo has an anonymized payment system, so you could pay with credit card and your payment information won’t be linked to your account.
