Do you trust Proton?

Trust but verify
- Fuck Reagan
- I now go with “Never trust, always verify”, which is the tagline for zero trust in infosec.
You can't create proton account anonymously very easily. If attempting to create account using for, you're prompted to enter phone number or existing email iirc.
Edit: just tested, existing email is needed. This already tells they do not want people to create accounts in a privacy respecting way even if it's somewhat trivial to bypass if you know how
- Tell me you don't understand the difference between privacy and anonymity without telling me
- Is it possible to use a throwaway email, such as tempmail.org?

'So aside from that one instance where they gave that guy's info to the feds, is there any reason not to trust them with my data?'

They were under a court order. They still have to follow their country's laws.

That is not to say you shouldn't question them, but that particular example should not be used.

If that person had better opsec it never would have been a thing.

Plus, the data they gave was minimal, basically just the recovery email address, if I remember. That person got caught because they used the same address on Twitter (or something) and then they could get more data, if I recall correctly.
- This is the key bit. So long as whatever they hand over still meets their services guidelines, the fact they cooperate with law enforcement is not in the least a knock to the promises they made.
  It would be another matter altogether if they were providing law enforcement with logs or information they said they don’t collect.
  People’s deductive reasoning is weak sauce.
Yeah I think most people confuse privacy with criminal behaviour. Proton has your back when it comes to the former, but they aren’t there to enable you to pirate or cause trouble, hiding behind their service.
I don’t see how making sure criminals are brought to justice is the same as protecting your anonymity on the net.
And even if mandated under law, it’s not like they actually log your travels and are handing that to law enforcement. Whatever they hand over still falls under their services guidelines.
- "Criminals" such as climate activists?
  https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2021/09/privacy-focused-protonmail-provided-a-users-ip-address-to-authorities/
- That's the thing. Anonymity on the internet should enable people to protect themselves against unethical laws. Law is not correct, it's just law

seem like they offer a lot for free

i gladly pay for proton knowing that i’m helping fund a critical tool for activists under oppressive regimes :)

more than google at least

Yeah i trust them more than the alternatives.

Based on my own privacy/security criteria, I chose and payed for protonmail when that was the only thing Proton had. I've been very happy with them and it's nice to see how much they've since popped off.

I trust them, but always remain vigilant, because things can change over time. But the founders initially were scientists who met at CERN, not a company that launched a product. That tells me quite a lot. Yes, over time they are becoming more professional, maybe more like a regular company, but i feel that privacy is still the main priority for them. They also organize a yearly event and the money they raise goes to certain projects that are related to privacy and freedom (if i remember correctly for instance to help journalists remain free press and things like that). Yes, it's one of the few companies that i really trust.

Also, yes, they sometimes are forced to give info to authorities (and they are quite open about that and explain what happened if people ask about that), but don't forget that they don't have much info on their clients, because everything is encrypted and they just cannot see what's inside a mail, for instance. So, they can't share that.

same here. one of a few companies that i actually trust. recent interview with CEO gave me even more confidence
- Do you have a link for that interview?

I don't completely trust any "privacy-focused" company, but I trust proton a lot more than most others.

In my view it's either my ISP seeing everything or someone else. I don't trust my ISP, I route my traffic to a different country where I don't live in and them viewing my activity is potentially less of a problem, in my view (just in case they do manage to de-anonymize me)

route my traffic to a different country where I don’t live in and them viewing my activity is potentially less of a problem
Depending on where you live, and where your service resides, this could be tricky.
In the US, for instance, if you've chosen a provider in Australia, then a FVEY agreement could be in place to share that data. This gets around the technicality that intel gathering is not occurring on US soil and is not being done by the gov.
And again with the US, if you've chosen a country that's not amiable to sharing user data, the US could very well be justifying that country as a target for pilfering data anyway.
So, that would leave choosing a service provider within the US, which should need to go through the FISA courts for any access to citizen data, but who knows after the Snowden revelations.
I guess that's the state of privacy if you've got a nation state that's targeted you for surveillance. Only way around it I can think of is data to be encrypted in transit and at rest, and only you control the keys. But that's not something that's going to happen with something like mainstream email anyway, too inconvenient for most folks (and you also don't know if your recipients are security conscious either).
- Thank you for explaining the gov surveillance part of it, that is a good point you're making. There's also the commercial surveillance I'm trying to avoid, in particular having my "psyche" profiled.
Route them to a country of some number of eyes? 😅
- Wdym?

For my threat model and use case, I trust them.

I don't trust them implicitly, but I do believe they are less likely to do certain things than Google which is enough to use them instead of Google for Email.

Proton Mail + Tor Browser + diligent OPSEC

Bingo bango, you don't even have to trust them.

You very much do have to trust them. They make the client you’re using.
If someone injects malicious code into their client, it can transmit your mail unencrypted, or even just transmit your private key. Will they inject malicious code into their own client? Almost definitely not. The chances are basically zero. But if they get hacked and someone else does, then it’s the same result.
Also, unless all email you receive is encrypted with OpenPGP, you’re still trusting ProtonMail to encrypt it for you before they put it in their database.
So yes, you still have to trust them.
- Wait... okay, I think we're talking about two different things.
  Emails you send or receive are not private. End of story. That's nothing to do with the provider; they're just not. SMTP is from the stone age of internet when nothing was private, and the attempts to graft a layer of encryption on top of it are from the bronze age, when encryption wasn't very standardized or well-tested against real threats, and all of that shows. Even if you put a significant amount of work into grafting full end-to-end PGP encryption on top of the best your provider can do to keep your emails private, it doesn't work. Emails are not private.
  What I assumed you were interested in was in separating your non-private collection of emails from your real world identity. Proton + Tor will do that, bang on. If you're trying to send and receive messages which are genuinely private, use one of the fairly good options which can do that (Signal or Matrix maybe). If you're trying to send and receive your non-private emails without it being linked to your real world identity, use Proton + Tor. If you're trying to send and receive SMTP emails without people being able to read them, you need to rethink what you want, because you're not going to be able to get that.
- ...Tor Browser?
  Also by "injecting malicious code" do you mean XSS? Yeah, that can happen, and it's usually not Protons fault. The emails are end-to-end encrypted and encrypted while in your inbox with public and private keys.
When I tried to register with a tor ip they asked for my phone number.
The issue with email, unless you are comumnicating between two Proton Mail accounts, is that your message will likely be stored on another server which is extremely likely to be unencrypted. The bottom line is that you can never trust the rest of the infrastructure, and you have no control over it. You can end-to-end encrypt using PGP, but this is extremely impractical.
- Yeah, email is unsafe, agreed. I addressed that below, saying I thought they just wanted to separate their real-world identity from their un-private emails. If you're trying to use Proton to keep your un-private emails private, you're gonna have a bad time and you should use some good end-to-end solution that isn't email instead.

Depends. Are you on a wanted list?

😀

No.

I trust no single hosted service, but you can use them with caution.

Proton used to have a deal with the Israeli company Radware, for DDoS protection. They have written a few disclaimers about how Radware only handled incoming traffic still with two encryption layers intact (SSL & OpenPGPjs), as if that was some sort of real protection if a company has access to raw incoming traffic.

Honestly, a company aimed at privacy, boasting of Swiss privacy, should know better than to route anything through Israeli companies.

For that one instance, not doing so would have been illegal and probably gotten them hit with a major penalty.

Any email sent to Proton in clear text is 100% accessible to them at the point of entry. They basically promise you that they won’t look at it before encrypting it for storage. So if you trust their promise, it’s all good.

Any email that comes in already end to end encrypted with OpenPGP is not accessible to them ever, kind of. If their client gets hacked and starts sending unencrypted messages to them or someone else, then they have access.

The only way to have a zero trust environment is always having people (or businesses) send you messages encrypted with OpenPGP, and never using Proton’s clients (webmail, mobile app, and desktop bridge). That’s fairly unreasonable, and you might as well use any other email service at that point.

So, you can trust them as much as any other company, because unless you write and run your own email server (which, trust me, is a huge pain in the ass*), that’s your only option.

I wrote and run an email service called Port87, which launched recently, and there are so many obstacles to doing this, even if you’re only running one user on one domain on one server.

Not at all. It woul be trivial for them to steal your private keys from their web client. And yes, we have the code. But it's impossible to verify that the code that is on Github and the one they send to your browser every time you log in is exactly the same.

Also, they make it quite hard to make an anonymous registration. And they've been cooperating with governments. Don't get me wrong, I don't support criminal activity. But I don't trust any government with citizen's data, Snowden proved that.

Edit: Oh and they have bribed various privacy related sites with their affiliate program to recommend their services, which I consider a shady tactic.

Why is it trivial for them to steal your private keys? Does your computer unable to verify public keys?
I'm a bit of a novice when it comes to HTTPS handshakes
- One of the bold claims of proton is that all your data is encrypted and they can't see it (not 100% sure how they do it, probably your key is encrypted with your password as a symmetric key? Then when you log in, the client unlocks your private key and then that key unlocks the emails and stuff).
  Now, it also turns out that they write the software that uses your key to decrypt the emails. It would be trivial for them to just send the keys back to themselves and decrypt all your stuff.
  I don't think this is a huge point against proton, as AFAIK no one else even offers encrypted email. But nonetheless I would like to see an api and some third party clients.

I do not trust any company, even if it is "privacy-friendly" or "anonymous". There is no way to proofe this, sure I could view the code but there might just be a slight possibility that the company is saving and stealing your data.Self-Hostinmg is for me the way to go.

Let's say that I trust Swiss laws more than other alternatives.

They apply only to Swiss citizens.

Yeah I would trust them. But I don't think I would use them because I just find their mail service to have too much friction in a lack of interoperability with clients unless you not only pay money, but also download a whole extra program just to decrypt your email. It's essentially a walled garden

I stopped using them because their Android app is absolute dog shit. But I would trust them more than Google.

Actually... this is the only internet privacy company that I trust. I just hope that they start to deliver new products and apps faster... especially on Android, so that we can de-Google our lives as much as possible.

For some use cases, perhaps. I do trust them to keel over as soon as anything looking like an authority sends a request. I don't trust them to be as good as their marketing.

No news about scams or particularly evil policies yet, which is far better than many providers.

Do you trust Proton?

For starters, such a question is coming at it from the wrong perspective. One should have trust in the software -- if such sowtware is, indeed, trustworthy -- and not in the entity that created it. If one seeks privacy, then they should be of the mindset that every entity is malevolent.

Lol no. Are you going to audit all the code you use ? You need to trust some organizations to make the audit. You NEED to trust some entities
- Are you going to audit all the code you use ? You need to trust some organizations to make the audit. You NEED to trust some entities
  While lacking in practicalicy, this is not a new idea. While It is certainly not impossible to have an entity that one can completely trust, I would just argue that such certainty is improbable.
  What I'm trying to get at is that one shouldn't approach this question from an appeal to authority -- i.e. Proton is trustworthy, therefore all of their services must be privacy friendly, and secure. The russian proverb "trust but verify" comes to mind.

When Proton has a single app available on native F-Droid wirh zero anti-features, not from a different repository,conly then will I use their services. I don't use anything from them now. No Protonmail, no VPN, I don't use them.

https://www.f-droid.org/en/packages/ch.protonvpn.android/
Mail's on Izzy, tho: https://apt.izzysoft.de/fdroid/index/apk/ch.protonmail.android On the other hand, I don't exactly see a reason to have a mail client on the phone at all. I mean web browsers do exist, and the app doesn't seem to provide any additional benefits.
Also, wdym by "single app"? If as in "at least one", then VPN counts, and if as in "one app that incorporates mall + VPN + whatever else they come up with"... Why?
P.S. I'm not agitating for or against using proton, just curious.
- There are reasons why email clients are more secure
- I said native F-Droid repsitory. I also said with zero anti-features.
  In F-Droid settings, under Include anti-feature apps, unselect all or turn off all options, turn off other repositories like Izzy, then do a regular app search for Proton, there is nothing available in F-Droid

No, mainly because they're pumping out too many services. Also free VPNs just sound really sketchy to me.

Why is anyone using email anymore? (He said with a straight face)

Personally, email exists solely for merchant receipts, and IRS collection notices. I don't use email with any family or friends. Matrix, signal, session, most any messenger but I prefer e2e.

Maybe I'm internetting wrong.

You must not have a white collar job. The corporate world lives for email.
I agree with you. Email is flawed and not appropriate for modern communication.
If you want the messages to be written in letter-like format, then you can write them that way. No need to make it chatty if you don't want to communicate that way.
Email shares far too much metadata and should be used just for account-updates, account-control (password reset, MFA, and so on), etc.
Otherwise I just push everyone to Signal, since it's normie-friendly and already using quantum-safe encryption.
--
To the OP's question: yes, I trust Proton. They can't access my data if they wanted to. They're a lot better than competing companies.
Check out some of the steps they've been taking to improve OpenPGP and go down to "Upcoming improvements" to see their future plans: https://proton.me/blog/openpgp-crypto-refresh
And, remember, they are more than just an email company: https://proton.me/blog
- https://piped.video/watch?v=iH626CXyNtE
  Dont use webmail, the purpose of a browser is to execute foreign code of unnown sources - they can serve you any website they would like
  dont use Email, it's all plain text on the servers (unless you insist on using pgp, yet still a lot of metadata is plain text)
  dont use centralised communication ie. Signal. You're creating societal habits that wont be easily changeable if you start to distrust them. Matrix and IRC etc. dont need a phone either
My friend doesnt have a smartphone, so we comnunicate via email ^^

No. I don't trust the Swiss. They're tied up with US intelligence and they'll do anything for money (that's why they're always neutral). I've gotten shit on here before for saying Protonmail might be a honeypot but I'm sticking by it.

Such a point is rather moot -- one should not be using email for any form of secure communications, as it is inherently insecure.

I feel the same OP. There's no good reason for it but I just don't trust them. I have no idea why.

I trust them. Yes, sometimes their marketing is unethical, but I think these are just miscalculations.

more than google

Ill get straight to the question: what should i use? I use proton currently but they are pretty sus.

Tutanota is nice and a bit cheaper too. A bit limited in features compared to proton but I still like it.
Ill get straight to the question: what should i use?
Are you referring to email?
- I thought it was obvious from the context but ues
Skiff looks cool
Fastmail looks nice in terms of features/cost - it is also owned by the people who run it, which is a big green flag.
But I am in the same boat, looking for a new service, haven't made a switch yet
- it is also owned by the people who run it
  The ownership of a service, ideally, should make no difference to that service's trustworthiness.

No, and I never will

I would think if someone's up to some actual shady shit that they don't want to draw the attention of any authorities, they'd be better off using a combination of several of the most popular web mail accounts, like Gmail, and manually encrypting the message before pasting it in or something I dunno, just bc it seems like surveillance systems become less effective with more collection volume, and Gmail has a lot of users

Or, better yet, one should simply not use email for secure communications.

No.

Their email service is bad. Why do I need a proton software to use thunderbird ? Why don’t you use open standards for email ?

Proton emails are stored in an encrypted form that goes beyond the simple authentication that is part of the POP/IMAP specifications
Proton does have open-source bridges/proxies, so they aren't hiding these details from us
Perhaps Thunderbird could be enhanced to support the Proton features directly?
- Proton does have open-source bridges/proxies, so they aren’t hiding these details from us
  The issue I talked about was not privacy-wise. It just suck to have to use a package that is not in debian repository just to receive commercial emails. Updates are a pain. And it is the kind of software that people should keep up-to-date.
  Proton emails are stored in an encrypted form that goes beyond the simple authentication that is part of the POP/IMAP specifications
  Ok, let's talk about privacy. Email will never be secure because it was not designed to be and there are too many issues.
  The subject line and other metadata are not encrypted. (from protonmail website). Most of the people use email to register to accounts and for commercial communications, where all valuables informations are in the object of the email.
  There are more private way to communicate with people (like xmpp or matrix for example)
  We kill people based on metadata. Well metadata encryption are pretty important.
  So giving up convenience for 0 security sucks.
  Perhaps Thunderbird could be enhanced to support the Proton features directly?
  It would be great if there were an add-on for it. If someone knows how to develop it, please do it, it would improve UX a lot.
  But it does not solve the issue completely. On mobile, the issue is still there (I know they have an app but I would prefer to have all my email at the same place). Also, if I want to use nextcloud mail, you have to developp an addon for nextcloud now.
  Edit: changed the link for the alternative piped link suggested.

Not at all, mental outlaw has a video why proton is a honeypot

And yeah, you can't really trust anything not self hosted by you

One of the biggest tinfoil hat youtubers out there, heh. I think he has some good stuff though, other stuff is just plain speculation and paranoia. Email in general is not secure, not everyone can self host or wants to self host. Proton does it's job for anyone that needs an alternative to Google and also wants to maintain a set of features like calendar, tasks and so on.
Link please.
- Very sorry, I'm not sure which videos it is
  Try to watch mental outlaw's and the hated one's videos about proton
- Sorry for YouTube link, i'm using newpipe
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IeXaYR4ed9c
  Edit: and also this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QCx_G_R0UmQ
- Or wait, maybe it's not mental outlaw
  Maybe this one https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AhdJzjC7Leo
And you can't even trust that - good luck finding hardware with open source schematic that is not ancient.
All processors have built-in spyware (Management Engine etc.), and that's not going to change, since there are only a few highly sophisticated factories in the world that can make them, and the factions controlling those have no interest in producing consumer grade spyware free hardware. Modern processors have become essential for weaponry and warfare, so this is not going to change, only get worse.