Even the guy that ran Silk Road messed up and provided his email address with his real name online while posting about Silk Road before almost anyone had heard about Silk Road. This would later come back to bite him.
> In that post, altoid asked for some programming help and gave his email address: rossulbricht@gmail.com. Doing a Google search for Ross Ulbricht, Mr. Alford found a young man from Texas who, just like Dread Pirate Roberts, admired the free-market economist Ludwig von Mises and the libertarian politician Ron Paul — the first of many striking parallels Mr. Alford discovered that weekend.
I don’t doubt for a second that a non-zero number of people similarly create a ProtonMail address for something shady and then provide a Gmail address using their real name as recovery address.
I'm currently a paying Proton customer. I'm dreaming of the day when I can cancel my subscription, to be honest.
I've been a customer for a few years now. Long enough to watch the company steadily scope creep in ways I don't agree with. I wasn't 100% against the VPN idea. But then came Drive. And calendar. And ...
Thing is, their core Mail product kinda sucks. End to end encryption is great, but have you ever actually tried to search for emails in Proton Mail? It's embarrassingly bad. I've lost count of the number of times I know exactly what I'm looking for in my mail archives, but no matter what search incantations I try, I can't find it.
Their bridge clients are stupid. The way threaded replies are handled are stupid. Their web UI is frustratingly laggy in Firefox. I didn't particularly like their iOS app, and now that I'm on Android, I don't particularly like their Android app, either.
For me, the next step is to self host my email. Yes yes, I know: "but self hosting your email is notoriously hard and bla bla bla!". Yes, no doubt. But email is important, and I've been burned by GMail, appalled by Fastmail spying for the Aussie govt (god, what a shitshow that was/is), and suffered constant disappointment as a Proton customer. Self hosting feels like the only option left.
Meanwhile everybody you exchange e-mails with doesn't care about any of this and unless using E2EE all your email contents will be known by their e-mail providers anyway.
> End to end encryption is great, but have you ever actually tried to search
I've implemented a few e2ee apps, both for myself and clients, and every single time this comes up, along with other business metrics / queries.
If the encryption model ensures the server cannot process the data in any way, it means everything has to be done locally by clients, and only on their own data.
Tried to register some months ago and they blocked me, support was giving a cold "we cannot tell why we are blocking you". It turns out their system gives a high score to self hosted email, since everything works if you use something like gmail.
This doesn't sound right. Our anti-abuse systems don't discriminate against self-hosted email by default. You can find the possible reasons for account suspension here: https://proton.me/legal/terms. You're also welcome to share your support ticket number with us here so we can track it internally.
The only data we could provide (in response to a binding Swiss legal order), was the user's recovery email address, which the user added himself, and is optional to begin with.
Unfortunately, said user also used that recovery address to create a Twitter account, and Twitter turned over his phone number and IP address.
Coincidentally, this case again proves that Proton Mail's encryption cannot be bypassed by law enforcement.
99% of users would be angry if they can’t restore their account because they forgot they credentials. A very small amount who needs the “privacy” knows that they shouldn’t set a non anonymous recovery email.
Providing recovery methods is certainly care about the users. Proton isn’t the weakest point in the privacy defenses: user stupidity is. If you make FBI or DHS your enemy, you’d better think about your attack surface and don’t assume there exists something or someone who will secure your communications for you.
This comment feels like it's coming from communist Russia. You'd better not make the KGB your enemy. Be careful not to do anything they would take an interest in, even if it's not illegal. Is that the USA we're living in? Sure feels like it sometimes.
The user you are replying to doesn’t live in the USA. And for non-US citizens, not doing anything a US three-letter agency might take an interest in is certainly a consideration, because US law doesn’t protect them. (I’m not sure how much better the situation is for US citizens in actual practice.)
If I would try to do something against American interests, US law would be the last thing I would care about. I have more faith in German or Swiss law regarding privacy and if that’s not enough, keeping data in Russian or Chinese jurisdiction in that specific case would make more sense.
He‘s unlucky to have a passport of a country with zero influence in this part of the world. I doubt that if he was in Australia he would be extradited.
The US has been like this since sometime in the 1950s, possibly even before. You had to watch what you said or you'd be labelled a communist sympathizer and the FBI'd take interest in you.
Your interpretation of my comment is wrong. I didn’t say you shouldn’t make certain powers your enemies. I said you need to prepare adequately.
Your country isn’t famous for protecting citizens privacy, on the contrary.
Well yes, because the odds that the average user will need recovery for their account at some point are pretty likely. Email being as important as it is for identification, the last thing you want is to be locked out because of some extremely improbable situation involving the FBI.
> The service is specifically for non-average users who want to maximize privacy.
That I think is a pretty small sliver of Proton users. Users who want to maximize privacy are certainly there, but I think most simply want a stable email provider that respects customer preferences instead of Google shenanigans. My 2c.
For example, I am a happy, paying Proton customer for my primary email that clearly identifies me by its domain.
If ProtonMail was solely for users who want to maximize privacy, it'd be as difficult to use a ProtonMail address as your primary email as it is to do your normal web browsing through Tor.
Services that are primarily used to hide shady stuff from the FBI tend to get shut down or, failing that, heavily stigmatized.
Proton was created because we believe that privacy is a human right, and therefore needs to be available to everyone. The Proton ecosystem is there to make privacy convenient.
For most users, losing a password is a major risk -- the most common request our support team receives on a daily basis is by far from users who lost their passwords. This is why we try to make sure users input some sort of recovery method. It doesn't need to be a recovery email address, or a phone number, you can also use a recovery phrase: https://proton.me/support/reset-password#how-to-reset-your-p...
Proton is a company not some charity and their services and what you do with them are hosted literally on someone else's computers that are outside of your control. They will comply with requests made by law encorcement if that's what they are forced to do, full stop.
If they don't know your username they can't offer a service. Hence zero knowledge services cannot exist based on your line of argumentation.
I feel you are being disingenuous though and you perfectly know what is commonly referred to as "zero knowledge", and specifically that the critical point is always "what does the zero knowledge applies to?".
Proton sees your IP, your login, email headers, for example. They don't know your email body and can't hand it over.
Note that our cryptography is open-source and independently audited: https://openpgpjs.org/. The encryption keys are generated with your Proton account password, which we don't have access to, so we have no way to decrypt your content stored encrypted on our servers.
Exactly, and even in the case when the emails are coming from a non-Proton service, the incoming emails are encrypted immediately after being checked for spam, phishing or malware: https://proton.me/support/proton-mail-encryption-explained.
If an entity exists for the purpose of subverting the exercise of legitimate government powers then the government in question should just bomb it flat. Tolerance would be dereliction of duty.
Of course, Proton is not such an entity, but they are happy that you have fooled yourself into paying for this imaginary property.
Hmmm, you're not a fan of civic disobedience and balance of powers it appears.
I think abuse of power by government is common and wanting to get protection against it is a fair ask.
And luckily this is not illegal in some countries.
Finally, some government are not representing the people at all (dictatorship) and I am lucky I do not live in such a country, because then the existence of proton has a whole other level of merits.
I almost downvoted this, but decided to rebut instead.
How far should this extend, in your opinion? Should the US be bombing cartels in Mexico? How about manufacturers of illicit goods like “Glock switches” in China? Tax avoidance firms in the US? The company registration division of the Turks and Caicos?
How about the headquarters of domestic companies found to be in violation of federal regulations?
This may actually be a good point. Instead of storing your recovery address, they could only store a hash of it, and require an email to be sent from the recovery address to initiate the recovery process. Still not completely zero-knowledge, but an improvement.
Not every mail system supports that and the longer & harder to guess it is the more likely it is that whatever disaster lead to needing the recovery process would also lose that information.
The rules on how long a local-part is allowed to be are very clear (https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc5321#section-4.5.3....), and once you’ve registered the address you would know that it works. You’d write it down and/or store it in your password manager like you would with any passphrase. I really don’t see the problem.
It’s not a question of whether it’s technically possible but practical to expect people to maintain a recovery address which is not otherwise used or guessable. If you can pull it off, sure, but from a security perspective I’d probably be looking for a way to avoid email at all for this mechanism since it just wasn’t designed around address privacy.
A google search will show Proton had cooperated before and given info leading to user arrest. THEY WILL 100% do it....sorry they did already. So it is greater than 100% from now onwards.
Any company will cooperate with law enforcement.
There was a comment some days ago, in another thread, about a company, from US, which didn't want to cooperate. It didn't turn well for this company.
There was a bomb threat email sent by one of the proton mail users to South Indian state’s TN, some weeks ago.
There was a big turmoil in 4-5 different schools in the city. Until the time they realised it to be a fake threat it was a nightmare. Some of my relatives were directly affected.
What’s the privacy crap we talk here?
Note that, at Proton, we are resolutely against the use of Proton services for purposes that are contrary to Swiss law (Proton is a Swiss company). The issue you're mentioning has been raised to the attention of the Swiss federal authorities, who have been in contact with the relevant Indian authorities. You can learn more about the case here: https://proton.me/blog/india-block-proton-mail
Come on guys. If you are sending stuff that cannot be seen for some reason (potentially illegal on your (potentially) authoritarian (and this includes the US) country) do not use e-mail. It’s a protocol from decades ago when the web was gentle and naive. For SMTP to work lots of stuff must be readable by the MTAs handling the message. It is also highly centralized nowadays because it essentially works on a whitelist of what the big providers allow. Just give up.
This is why Apple didn't bother to implement E2EE for iCloud Mail, Calendar, and Contacts for Advanced Data Protection. It was just never meant for privacy, and any implementation would just have backdoors everywhere.
People who think this is interesting news always turn out to have Twitter accounts completely full of batshit content. We live in a society. The state exists and has powers legitimized by the consent of the governed. Grow up and get over it.
People are surprised by this because Proton does the best it can to hide what information they actually have that isn't E2EE. Especially if you want to use it as a regular email service as a form of "privacy" (just read https://proton.me/mail/security if you want to see how misleading they're trying to be. "Strong encryption at all times" *except when there isn't).
Sorry, but what exactly is misleading on that page? Over and over again it says that the content of your email is encrypted. It's very specific about that, and it's hard to see how someone would misinterpret that to include the account recovery email address.
"We cannot read or give anyone else access to your emails." is completely false, Proton can read emails sent or received from non-proton infrastructure. They have to.
I mean just look at the end-to-end encryption block, it's such an obvious dark pattern to make people believe they're getting end to end encryption, but when you actually read it they don't claim it at all, but how is someone who doesn't understand technobabble supposed to know that? They're just trying to pretend it's the same thing.
If Proton was an American company they would have been fined into the ground for this stunt. Google wasn't even safe from the Incognito mode lawsuit.
> With Proton Mail, emails are encrypted at all times, so we can never access your messages. The content of your emails is encrypted on your device before being sent to our servers, meaning only you and your intended recipient can decrypt it.
> You can also use our Password-protected Emails feature to quickly send end-to-end encrypted emails to any email address, not just Proton Mail accounts.
That first sentence, if left alone, could be interpreted to include incoming email from non-Proton Mail accounts. But as soon as you keep reading it clears that right up:
* It clearly says that the security comes from encrypting outbound email on your device.
* It clearly says that there is a way to encrypt outgoing email even to non-Proton Mail accounts.
This isn't technobabble either, it's using terminology that is as accessible to laypeople as possible while still being precise in its language.
> But as soon as you keep reading it clears that right up
C'mon man, even you should know how much BS that is. They are misleading people and they know it, just hoping nobody reads the fine print. I have 0 trust in Proton because of this shit.
It doesn't matter what they say in the fine print, telling people there's strong encryption at all times right next to "end-to-end encryption" would fool anyone into thinking Proton can't read email in transit to non-Proton emails (in fact they even claim this, and it's false). They wouldn't be able to gain any users if they told the truth that they are the same as any other email provider except when they email their own users.
They even have the gall to say they offer a more secure business email but don't offer SAML or log integration, very basic things any actual business is required to have if they want to even meet baseline security measures.
It's not fine print, it's the second sentence of the main body text!
If someone can't be bothered to even read beyond the first sentence of the marketing page, then privacy and encryption aren't actually important to them, it's just an aesthetic.
The only data we could provide (in response to a binding Swiss legal order), was the user's recovery email address, which the user added himself, and is optional to begin with.
Unfortunately, the said user also used that same recovery address to create a Twitter account, and Twitter turned over his phone number and IP address.
Coincidentally, this case again proves that Proton Mail's encryption cannot be bypassed by law enforcement.
97 comments
[ 4.6 ms ] story [ 169 ms ] thread> In that post, altoid asked for some programming help and gave his email address: rossulbricht@gmail.com. Doing a Google search for Ross Ulbricht, Mr. Alford found a young man from Texas who, just like Dread Pirate Roberts, admired the free-market economist Ludwig von Mises and the libertarian politician Ron Paul — the first of many striking parallels Mr. Alford discovered that weekend.
https://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/27/business/dealbook/the-uns...
I don’t doubt for a second that a non-zero number of people similarly create a ProtonMail address for something shady and then provide a Gmail address using their real name as recovery address.
https://twitter.com/monetaryreset/status/1766156285249012151
I've been a customer for a few years now. Long enough to watch the company steadily scope creep in ways I don't agree with. I wasn't 100% against the VPN idea. But then came Drive. And calendar. And ...
Thing is, their core Mail product kinda sucks. End to end encryption is great, but have you ever actually tried to search for emails in Proton Mail? It's embarrassingly bad. I've lost count of the number of times I know exactly what I'm looking for in my mail archives, but no matter what search incantations I try, I can't find it.
Their bridge clients are stupid. The way threaded replies are handled are stupid. Their web UI is frustratingly laggy in Firefox. I didn't particularly like their iOS app, and now that I'm on Android, I don't particularly like their Android app, either.
For me, the next step is to self host my email. Yes yes, I know: "but self hosting your email is notoriously hard and bla bla bla!". Yes, no doubt. But email is important, and I've been burned by GMail, appalled by Fastmail spying for the Aussie govt (god, what a shitshow that was/is), and suffered constant disappointment as a Proton customer. Self hosting feels like the only option left.
I have found success, using SPF and DKIM signing. I had to do that, to get emails from my current app, through Apple's anonymizer.
Are they holding you hostage? Is there a contractual obligation preventing you from cancelling? Why can’t you just cancel it if it sucks?
I've implemented a few e2ee apps, both for myself and clients, and every single time this comes up, along with other business metrics / queries.
If the encryption model ensures the server cannot process the data in any way, it means everything has to be done locally by clients, and only on their own data.
Also, bye bye BI.
The actual warrant can be found here and has the important missing details: https://drive.proton.me/urls/57QC5F26BW#nseYl6ICaQHm
The only data we could provide (in response to a binding Swiss legal order), was the user's recovery email address, which the user added himself, and is optional to begin with.
Unfortunately, said user also used that recovery address to create a Twitter account, and Twitter turned over his phone number and IP address.
Coincidentally, this case again proves that Proton Mail's encryption cannot be bypassed by law enforcement.
That I think is a pretty small sliver of Proton users. Users who want to maximize privacy are certainly there, but I think most simply want a stable email provider that respects customer preferences instead of Google shenanigans. My 2c.
For example, I am a happy, paying Proton customer for my primary email that clearly identifies me by its domain.
Services that are primarily used to hide shady stuff from the FBI tend to get shut down or, failing that, heavily stigmatized.
Hence I think it's pretty clear for ZK customers that a company has to abide to the local law...
The article is about what Proton knows, not what they will or will not do if the law knocks on their door.
I feel you are being disingenuous though and you perfectly know what is commonly referred to as "zero knowledge", and specifically that the critical point is always "what does the zero knowledge applies to?".
Proton sees your IP, your login, email headers, for example. They don't know your email body and can't hand it over.
Of course, Proton is not such an entity, but they are happy that you have fooled yourself into paying for this imaginary property.
I think abuse of power by government is common and wanting to get protection against it is a fair ask.
And luckily this is not illegal in some countries.
Finally, some government are not representing the people at all (dictatorship) and I am lucky I do not live in such a country, because then the existence of proton has a whole other level of merits.
How far should this extend, in your opinion? Should the US be bombing cartels in Mexico? How about manufacturers of illicit goods like “Glock switches” in China? Tax avoidance firms in the US? The company registration division of the Turks and Caicos?
How about the headquarters of domestic companies found to be in violation of federal regulations?
ALL companies must abide by the law. What did you expect? That they break the law? Not a very sustainable business model...
How’s that for privacy?
Coming back to the question, the roads you travel, the vehicle you commute are all under constant surveillance, FYI.
They need a page like this to explain what exactly is E2EE and what isn't: https://support.apple.com/en-us/102651
Is that claim itself not accurate?
I mean just look at the end-to-end encryption block, it's such an obvious dark pattern to make people believe they're getting end to end encryption, but when you actually read it they don't claim it at all, but how is someone who doesn't understand technobabble supposed to know that? They're just trying to pretend it's the same thing.
If Proton was an American company they would have been fined into the ground for this stunt. Google wasn't even safe from the Incognito mode lawsuit.
> With Proton Mail, emails are encrypted at all times, so we can never access your messages. The content of your emails is encrypted on your device before being sent to our servers, meaning only you and your intended recipient can decrypt it.
> You can also use our Password-protected Emails feature to quickly send end-to-end encrypted emails to any email address, not just Proton Mail accounts.
That first sentence, if left alone, could be interpreted to include incoming email from non-Proton Mail accounts. But as soon as you keep reading it clears that right up:
* It clearly says that the security comes from encrypting outbound email on your device.
* It clearly says that there is a way to encrypt outgoing email even to non-Proton Mail accounts.
This isn't technobabble either, it's using terminology that is as accessible to laypeople as possible while still being precise in its language.
C'mon man, even you should know how much BS that is. They are misleading people and they know it, just hoping nobody reads the fine print. I have 0 trust in Proton because of this shit.
It doesn't matter what they say in the fine print, telling people there's strong encryption at all times right next to "end-to-end encryption" would fool anyone into thinking Proton can't read email in transit to non-Proton emails (in fact they even claim this, and it's false). They wouldn't be able to gain any users if they told the truth that they are the same as any other email provider except when they email their own users.
They even have the gall to say they offer a more secure business email but don't offer SAML or log integration, very basic things any actual business is required to have if they want to even meet baseline security measures.
If someone can't be bothered to even read beyond the first sentence of the marketing page, then privacy and encryption aren't actually important to them, it's just an aesthetic.
Apple (iCloud, Mail, etc.): https://www.apple.com/legal/transparency/
Facebook / Meta (Instagram, etc.): https://transparency.fb.com/reports/
Google (Gmail, Google Voice, Search, etc.): https://transparencyreport.google.com/user-data/overview
Microsoft (Skype, Outlook 360, LinkedIn, etc.): https://www.microsoft.com/en-au/digitalsafety/transparency-r...
Proton: https://proton.me/legal/transparency
TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/transparency/en/reports/
Twitter / X: https://transparency.x.com/en.html
1. Use a custom domain for your emails with Proton
2. Set an address @ that domain as the recovery address
3. If you need to recover, simply update your MX records to point elsewhere, and begin the recovery process from another provider temporarily.
The only data we could provide (in response to a binding Swiss legal order), was the user's recovery email address, which the user added himself, and is optional to begin with.
Unfortunately, the said user also used that same recovery address to create a Twitter account, and Twitter turned over his phone number and IP address.
Coincidentally, this case again proves that Proton Mail's encryption cannot be bypassed by law enforcement.