Comment on Proton Mail Discloses User Data Leading to Arrest in Spain
ID411@lemmy.dbzer0.com 6 months agoDon’t tell me, tell the guy they gave up . ?
They market to activists and people concerned with the business of protest, not Swiss law experts - and are very much are not up front about what could happen if they are contact by LE. Of course They don’t hide it, but you won’t find it on the front page, where they trumpet about Swiss privacy… You and I know the detail, many users may not.
At the end of the day, they attract a lot of activists and protesters to their service, with the offer of “safe and secure email. “ .
They hold a database of all them, in a jurisdiction that requires them to comply with legal requests for information.
They service some 6000 such requests from their database of every year, or around 30 per day.
You can decide for yourself who this efficient and eminently accessible single source of protesters information helps the most.
EncryptKeeper@lemmy.world 6 months ago
This information was just as clearly and easily accessible by the guy who was caught, as it is to you, and to me. If you’re going to commit crimes using a cloud service, the onus is really on you to put in a minimal amount of effort to familiarize yourself with what is protected and what isn’t. Proton is extremely up front about this, and give you all the information you need to be safe.
Proton never advertised to a single user that all your data is safe from the Swiss government. On the contrary, their main selling point is that the Swiss government is the primary driver of their secure offering. They encrypt what they can using zero trust encryption, and that is left over is secured by the Swiss Governments laws regarding businesses sharing information with foreign governments.
ID411@lemmy.dbzer0.com 6 months ago
I’ve never sought to absolve the user of responsibility, but nor am I ready to label him a criminal, which you seem to be able to do.
At the same time, my words were quite specifically a mild criticism of Proton who are, for reasons I have explain, not entirely the privacy haven it is perceived to be, because of design decisions, where it choose to host its servers and the fact that it has perhaps unknowingly created a highly functional database for law enforcement to query in demand.
EncryptKeeper@lemmy.world 6 months ago
I don’t label him anything. He clearly did something that guided his decision to use a more privacy-centric service to avoid the prying eyes of his own government. That could be crimes, civil disobedience, it doesn’t matter.
Proton deserves no criticism here. It has not created any functional database of any group of people to be queried by anybody, much less law enforcement.
It is exactly the privacy haven it appears to be because to this date there has been no reason to believe otherwise. Proton has and continues to offer the protections it’s promised to, without deviation. You just seem to have some kind of personal bone to pick with Proton and are using this story to distort the truth in order to create some kind of anti-proton narrative. I’m no corporate fanboy, but right now we have very few privacy-focused cloud services and for the duration they remain so, I’m not going to tear them down for no reason.
ID411@lemmy.dbzer0.com 6 months ago
Quite the opposite.
You’ve been triggered by very mild criticism of Proton and the small but nonetheless important risks associated with using that service.
You have accused the user in question of doing crimes - it’s there in your comment for everyone to see. You are unable to accept that a firm that according to their own data, services 6000 requests for information under the Law, is a useful source of information for Law Enforcement.
There’s no where for this conversation to go from here.