No, they responded to a legal request by the swiss government to provide banking details.
Sounds just like Proton in the article:
Proton AG clarified they shared no data directly with the FBI — technically accurate but missing the point.
The fuck is the point? That banking details are subpeonable?
The point is that the headline is true. Proton helped the FBI uncover that person's identity, by revealing their banking information.
Yes, it was legal for the Swiss government to request that information and for Proton to release it when asked.
Those facts aren't mutually exclusive.
I don't understand why you're responding so aggressively.
Because people are like "OMG proton is such a snitch time to switch to <other service that will do the exact same thing>"
Thanks for explaining. I'm not "people".
I had a similar feeling about people leaving Discord for .
Nah, discord has access to unencrypted chat logs and will happily give that up. Way way more of an impetus to leave.
not directly related but on top of this, wasnt it the massive campaining and political pressure from us and eu that forced swiss banks to lift the swiss bank secrecy? maybe people start to understand this law exist(ed) for other reasons than tax evasion.
Again, they did not "aid" nor "give" that information. They were legally obliged to do so. There was never a choice. This could've happened with literally any company, E2EE stops them from being forced to turn over the emails themselves, but basic account metadata (creation date, payment methods, contact details, potentially IP access logs) will always be available. What you can do is limit the amount of information a provider requires/saves (for which Proton is a good choice) or don't rely on a company at all and roll your own email server.
In fact, knowing that the only thing Proton was able to hand over was the credit card identifier is pretty solid proof that they in fact cannot access (and thus provide access to) your email account and its contents.
If full anonimity is the goal then stick to crypto or cash payments, because credit card always leaves a trail and not a single email provider is above the law in that regard.
This case is entirely the fault of the user's bad opsec.
Yeah, it's the distinction between "anonymous" and "private".
In this case, wouldn't rolling your own email server make it even easier to find you, since they'll just have to look up who registered the domain you used for your email address?
Depending on how you register the domain, there are some registrars that require no info at all. One of those paid with Monero creates no links to your identity.
But yes, self-hosting does not shield you from court orders. If they find you they can still access your shit, depending on how much your country's infosec police gives a shit and/or how closely they cooperate with US agencies.
Proton is clear that they complie with legsl government requests and post stats about how many they fight and handover. They offer private ways to use the service and if you dont take them thats on you.
They complied with Swiss law. Only the name on the credit card was given.
Could've paid with crypto, choose not to.
or even cash
I'm not sure entering the ponzi scheme that is cryptocurrencies would have helped in this case.
Yeah using a public ledger would have saved the FBI having to get a warrant, especially given how in bed crypto-exchanges are with Trump
Sad to see the Swiss are still complying with demands from a fascist regime.
If you're going to be doing illegal shit in your activism, you should consider using anonymous communication methods like SimpleX.
Remember when Switzerland was neutral?
When was that? They took in the Nazi gold.
My question is what's the legal requirements for payments? How long do they have to keep transaction records and do they have to connect this to accounts? This should be available in the ToS(but cannot find this). Compare with Mullvad (https://mullvad.net/en/help/no-logging-data-policy) (Edit: spelling)
I'm pretty sure proton offers a crypto payment of some form. Which would mean if this person had used that instead of a credit card, theoretically there wouldn't be anything to subpoena.
Either way, email isn't exactly safe.
More and more I consider just self hosting. Does have obvious drawbacks though 😅
Even some commercial less well known mail providers are sometimes blocked by big players like gmail and outlook for anti-spam reasons.
Just set up dkim, SPF, and dmarc properly and you should be good.
Nope. Take for example Gmx.
Due to the heuristics some of the providers have, such as Microsoft, they will start classifying mail sent from gmx as spam and auto move it to people's spam folder. They have developed their own internal trust metrics and these periodically just spambin low trust servers
proton mail and tutanota(?) are both walled garden faking it as if theyre super safe
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
