Comment on ProtonMail Logged IP Address of French Activist; Should You Be Worried About Your Privacy?
Dojan@pawb.social 6 days agoI’m comparing Mullvad (a company) to Proton (a company) not their products. They both have a no-log policy (that’s a company policy) only one is actually no logs, and the other is “we sometimes log.” I don’t think you’re stupid either, so I don’t get what’s not coming through>
_cryptagion@anarchist.nexus 6 days ago
You’re being dishonest, is what’s not getting through.
Mullvad doesn’t log because their product is built from the ground up to not be capable of connecting users to their activity. Email was invented before true anonymity on the internet was even a concept. To date, nobody has developed an email solution that is incapable of logging its users when forced to by the government. Both companies have a no log policy, and both follow that policy, insofar as it isn’t breached by force by a legal order from their government. If Mullvad had a system where that was possible, they would have given up that information when they were raided, because they would have had no fucking choice. But like Proton, their VPN is incapable of logging access.
Comparing email to a VPN is about as dishonest and bad faith as anyone can get. Email was never intended to be anonymous, and VPNs were. You know this, which is why you compared Proton’s email to Mullvad’s VPN. If you had compared the two VPNs from both companies, your argument would have immediately fallen apart because neither are capable of logging users without completely rewriting the entire system from the ground up. Your argument is no different than comparing a hippo to a bird, then complaining because the hippo can’t fly.
Dojan@pawb.social 6 days ago
Mullvad’s VPN is incapable of doing so because their infrastructure is entirely built on volatile memory. This obviously doesn’t work with email because the emails need to persist, but this is isn’t a very big problem as that storage is encrypted.
My problem here is that access logs don’t need to be stored permanently. That could definitely be stored on a volatile medium, and then authorities could come over and confiscate it as much as they want. That sort of software architecture is entirely possible to set up, but Proton has made a decision not to.
That is a choice. They could’ve chosen to not comply, they could’ve chosen to let the authorities raid their servers, and had their servers been set up in such a fashion that no data could be obtained, there wouldn’t be a problem.
They’ve chosen instead to log and give up information on a climate activist; not a ring of traffickers, or a terrorist group, but some dude or dudette that thinks that climate change is a bit of a problem and that the people in charge aren’t doing enough about it.
I guess we’ll have to agree to disagree. Do I realise that this creates legal problems for Proton? Yeah. So what? They’re a corporation, they get to deal with it. What this incident has shown is that their word doesn’t mean a thing. What happens when the fascist American regime starts demanding information on dissenters? Are they just going to fold and serve up whatever they ask on a silver platter, too?
What’s dishonest is saying “we don’t log, except when we do, and only when they’re serious criminals, or climate activists.”
Cabbage_Pout61@lemmy.world 5 days ago
To be fair, the IP is basically the only thing they can get, due their encryption they have access to the email body, which complies with privacy, but not anonymity.