What happened to ProtonMail?
On the official website of ProtonMail, announce that no personal information is required to create a secure email account, in addition, by default they do not save any type of record as a public IP address that could be linked to the anonymous email account that provides this service, according to them, our privacy comes first. Taking this into account, it seems that this email service is very secure, private and totally anonymous since it does not keep any type of record.
ProtonMail is based in Switzerland, one of the countries with greater control of the privacy of its users, however, the company has received a legal order with the Swiss Federal Department of Justice, related to a group of people called «Youth for Climate », And in this legal order he was urged to provide the IP address and all related information of a user of ProtonMail, likewise, it has also been asked what type of device has been used by this group to access the account from ProtonMail.
The société @ProtonMail A livré à la police les IP de militants pour le climat, suite à quoi ces militants ont été arrêtés et perquisitionnés. ProtonMail prétend sur pourtant on the website in order to preserve the IP addresses of your users. https://t.co/TlarH9DD9F
– onestla.tech (@OnEstLaTech) September 5, 2021
Even though the company promises that there are no records of public IP addresses and no data is stored, the truth is that the company has recognized that it should always do what the Swiss authorities ask of it, although these requests are to later help foreign services such as Europol in their investigations. The company has indicated in a Reddit thread that there was no possibility of appealing or rejecting the particular request.
In other words, ProtonMail stores information such as IP address and type of device from which the service was accessed, and, furthermore, if the Swiss authorities ask for any information, then they are forced to provide them with all the necessary data. This company is required to comply with Swiss law, for this reason, if a crime is committed that is illegal in Switzerland, and the authorities require it, privacy protections are suspended and Swiss law requires them to provide as much information as possible. . They have also indicated that this collaboration is not done by default, only under a court order.
In the event that ProtonMail users are afraid of the visibility of their IP addresses, they could always use anonymous VPN services to access your email, or access this email service through the Tor network, with the aim of making it difficult for the authorities to carry out investigations related to this service, and to obtain additional anonymity. You can visit our tutorial on send anonymous and private emails.
In the following tweet you can perfectly see that the IP address information has been obtained through ProtonMail:
Une explanation @ProtonMail ? pic.twitter.com/DhBt14gJAH
– onestla.tech (@OnEstLaTech) September 5, 2021
It seems that right now, thanks to the information provided by ProtonMail, all users are detained and brought to justice.
If you regularly use ProtonMail to have maximum privacy in your communications, you should be very careful from now on, because several arrests have already been known due to the information provided by this service. Another very important detail is the lack of transparency of ProtonMail, they indicate that they do not store any personal data, but they have provided the public IP address, this is not anonymous at all because the tracking is much easier.
Will you continue to use ProtonMail after this has happened?
