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I agree. The fact ProtonMail exists in a world that's pretty hostile to individual privacy is hardly their fault, I think they were pretty good at explaining what their limits are compared to a lot of companies out there. It'd be churlish to leave ProtonMail for say, Gmail or another mainstream offering that makes far less of an effort to be private and transparent in my opinion.

I feel there's a lot of people who are absolutists about privacy without realising the legal and technical realities of that absolutism. I don't agree for one minute with governments and corporations compromising people's privacy, but whatever we like to tell ourselves about liberal democracy all authority amounts to "might makes right" in the end, and ProtonMail doesn't have the mightiest club to swing around in this situation.

These "absolutists" are people looking for:

- a service which would blindly accept money/crypto-money,

- in exchange of a worldwide legal shield which would take all of the heat resulting from the user's anonymous actions.

This service is not going to exist for $100/year. It would not even be safe to offer such a service for a million dollars per year, because the responsibility could be huge (terrorist attacks, human trafficking, etc.). Nobody in their right mind would be ready to bear this kind of legal responsibility without trusting (and thus knowing) their customers.

Why would protonmail be responsible for human traffic that happens unbeknownst to them? They don't need to "shield" merely just don't keep any logs so there is nothing to seize. If I go to walmart and buy a trailer with cash while wearing a mask (which walmart blindly accepts) to cram a bunch of illegals in to cross the border, why would that be walmart's fault if they don't have any log of who I am? Are you demanding walmart keep KYC of anyone buying knives, trailers, and anything else that could be used for illegal purposes.

> demanding walmart keep KYC of anyone buying knives, trailers, and anything else that could be used for illegal purposes

Nobody is. But if you buy a trailer every week, it wouldn’t be unreasonable for law enforcement to ask Walmart to let them organise a sting outside or even just leave a video camera on premises. They could do that without a warrant in the U.S., Walmart willing, something that is illegal with ProtonMail in Switzerland.

How is it hostile to user privacy to respond to legal requests for information?

It's not. My guess is that some folks are of a hard libertarian leaning even verging into sovereign citizenship.

I just can’t get over how their billing model works. Making bills and locking account suddenly without a warning. It felt so big scam that I’m not coming back regardless of whatever the privacy is.

> But their technology, policies and the strength of Swiss privacy law [1] make them a less-ideal coöperator for the NSA than e.g. Google or Comcast.

There is also another viewpoint. Since ProtonMail is non-USA company, any internet activity associated with non-US citizens isn't protected by the US Constitution when CIA et al. are in action. They can do whatever they please.

Also, the background of the ProtonMail is not so clear. Many might not know as they have tried to hide it, but MIT guys have been in big part of originally writing the ProtonMail, which can be linked to CIA/NSA oversight[1].

Also, major part from the equity ownership belongs to U.S (Charles River Ventures was one of the first big funders, and this naturally happens)

I also leave this interesting link here[2] (The Truth About Protonmail).

[1]: https://web.archive.org/web/20210226014214/https://privacy-w...

[2]: https://web.archive.org/web/20210220023958/https://privacy-w...

This is all false unfortunately.

First, Charles River Ventures is no longer a shareholder: https://protonmail.com/blog/crv-investment-other-news/

Second, all of ProtonMail's code that runs on your device is open source and independently audited. It would be nearly impossible to hide a backdoor in there.

> Second, all of ProtonMail's code that runs on your device is open source and independently audited.

When will you support reproducible builds, or are you supporting it already? Because only then we can be 100% that same code is actually running in there without reverse-engineering between every update.

> They still don’t get to hand over your emails

This gets at the key tech question: what's the most they could do? (either in response to a legal order or for any other reason)

ProtonMails answer here is "not much"; they can log IPs and access times. Signal has a great write up about how they respond to warrants, and it's similar: just IP and last access time.

But is that really all?

Protonmail has a web app. This time, a court said "you must add server side logging for these specific accounts". Could a court also say "you must add client side logging for this specific account"? If so, could that come w a gag order such that only that one user gets served different code, almost impossible to detect?

That would let a user read their mail.

I am very curious whether the App Stores have ever served modified versions of apps to specific users in order to, for example, extract Signal messages.

Software update is a key problem, closely related to the Ken Thompson "Reflections on Trusting Trust" thought experiment. I'm using a tool: how can I know for sure that I'm using the same copy everyone else has, not one that's been compromised?

The scenario you describe with the apps, is not actually possible under Swiss law. Swiss laws are very clear about this, they do not allow the authorities to order something like this.

> They still don’t get to hand over your emails, which is an improvement over most other providers.

They do if they're asked to and you're not using their custom e2e thing (e.g. you're using the imap gateway).

Are you talking about the Bridge? That appears to run locally on your computer and wouldn't provide their servers any further access than their custom clients.

https://protonmail.com/bridge/