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Comment by huimang | Hacker News Reader

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.

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The "average" user is on Gmail, not ProtonMail. The service is specifically for non-average users who want to maximize privacy.

> 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.

We want to recommend it to average users.

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