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Comment by protonmail | Hacker News Reader

Note that Gmail doesn't use zero-access encryption: https://proton.me/blog/zero-access-encryption. This is why Google has the technical ability to scan your email content, and Proton doesn't - on Proton Mail, you can only access your inbox with the account password, which only the account owner should have.

Email trackers, on the other hand, load upon the opening of a particular emails, not the entire inbox, so that shouldn't prolong the time it takes to load the web app, but only those emails that contain them.

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> This is why Google has the technical ability to scan your email content, and Proton doesn't

I don't buy this theatre for 1 second. Proton obviously has the ability to run a data business off my data if they wanted to - they own it all and it runs on their server.

Not saying they do it, but the idea that it's impossible because of "encryption" is a joke - you assign the keys and you could easily use them on the backend out of my view, the user has no visibility into how that works or what you guys do behind the scenes - it's not like decentralized technology (even the best decentralized tech can't deliver on this promise yet).

So it seems like it's slow because of client-side encryption which Google also does. Yes I know they have a data business, but the data is still encrypted.

It's been confirmed in independent audits, and our code and cryptography are open-source, so they can be inspected (https://proton.me/community/open-source). It's also been confirmed in court, as we were never able to provide any of our users' email content to the law enforcement (when presented with legal data requests that we have no grounds to contest). Basically, we protect users' data by having no access to it.

Your encryption keys are encrypted with your password (which we don't have access to), so we cannot access or use your keys. Therefore, the server doesn't in fact have access to your private encryption key. Once the files are encrypted with the user’s public encryption key they are no longer accessible to the server or the server’s owner: https://proton.me/blog/zero-access-encryption. For more resources on PGP encryption we recommend this one too: https://proton.me/blog/what-is-pgp-encryption.

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