Um...obviously, yeah? The alternative to complying with the authorities is to challenge it in court, which is extremely expensive. The important question is not how much information they do hand over, but how much information they have themselves. For example, if your keys are private, proton has nothing useful to share. This is why end-to-end encryption matters, the only avenue to real privacy is to make sure Proton has nothing useful to share. They're not going to host their servers on international waters.
this post was submitted on 22 Dec 2025
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I using proton more as a middle finger to google than anything else and at that it works fine.
Posteo has nice fingers
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This view might be controversial but here goes. If someone is suspected of a major crime (rape, serious assault, murder, major theft), maybe it's okay for law enforcement to gain access to that person's online accounts.
People might say "but if the government has the power to do that, one day they could do it to you, or they could use those powers to oppress anybody who criticises the government". But isn't that like saying "if you build prisons then one day an authoritarian government might put any critic of the government in those prisons"?
It should be at the companies discretion. Convince a company, that can be held liable, that you actually got something worth breaking the rules for.
I don't disagree in concept but the problem is governments already are the bad guys. We know the US has contracted with another government to torture citizens of third countries. We know the UK is going to charge Greta with terrorism charges because she held up a sign in an annoying way. We know Germany has lost the fight vs Nazis, again. The bad part is already here.
In proton's case it's more insulting because their whole marketing schtick is fake privacy. Private email but only if everyone you know is on the same service and even the only the body of the email is private. Private vpn even though vpns don't do much for privacy unless the privacy you want is your isp to not know you're torrenting tentacle porn. They've added some other things lately that seem actually private but they were so late to the game it hardly matters.
Yeah this isn't good at all especially when they market themselves as secure but just have full access to all the data.
There's gotta be something out there better than these crappy systems ready to throw you under a bus under barely any pressure.
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Proton threads are where the leftists equivalents to sovereign citizens pop up. Learn the technology a bit and about legal systems. That's what you have to operate within. If you want to feel more in control, encrypt everything yourself and only communicate/share in encrypted channels. At least then the primary sources of leaks is you and the receiver. If not, you're whining about streamlined performant services that will never be perfect enough for your standards because they operate legally rather than the user unfriendly solutions that you aren't willing to operate yourself for your life (maybe to be passed on) and/or won't run/can't afford to operate the illegal operation
However, if it is protected by law... and the law changes over time and then, mysteriously, logs appear in the past, then it has absolutely nothing to do with the law. Rather, it means that lies were told for years beforehand.
Once again - Proton is legally obligated to comply with the laws of the country in which they are based. This isn't specific to Proton, and they are not going behind your back to do this. In case it's not clear, this data is directly from Proton.
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If you want encrypted mail, go the GnuPG route, everything else is only cosplaying security.
This holds true for any kind of secure communication you want to do.
Manually handling keys and encryption with GPG is the core of good opsec, and also a reason why 99% of "crime prevention" backdoors are probably not going to do much. But people are lazy, been a while since I saw a drug dealer hand out public GPG keys, ever since Telegram and the like got popular.
I mean, they're still out there if you know where to look.
You're right though people are often too lazy for gpg.
I don’t think that’s bad on Proton’s part. They are obeying the law they are obliged to obey.
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