Protonmail is not secure

During the IndieGoGo campaign in which Protonmail successfully gained in close to half a million dollars of donations/ crowd funded investor monies etc the promise (or at least the public pitch) was always that it was "FULLY Anonymous" and that there was "No tracking or logging of personally identifiable information." and again wording of : " No tracking or logging of user data." and also that of "Unlike competing services, we do not save any tracking information. We do not record metadata such as the IP addresses used to log into accounts. We also have no way to scan encrypted messages to serve targeted advertisements. To protect user privacy, ProtonMail does not require any personally identifiable information to register." etc etc etc


So why did you start tracking IP addressess and logging info and what was the reason and rationale for such a dramatic departure from what you earlier claimed had "set you apart" essentially from the competing services like Google and Yahoo? It is one thing when policies change, but something else when you change something as fundamental to their core essence and value proposition of your service as flip flopping from no-tracking, fully-anonymous, to "yes we are tracking", "yes we proactively cooperate with law enforcement in turning over logging and tracking data" etc; If like the case of the child kidnapping was important enough for you to cooperate with law enforcement of a foreign government without first officially obtaining a valid court order then it should likewise also be important enough for you to be abundantly clear with your end-users and userbase that you do make exceptions to the things that you had essentially earlier promised that you would not infringe upon.

Formalities matter to the extent that they are/were used as a selling or pitching point of your product or service. If you had previously stated that Protonmail doesn't cooperate without first obtaining a valid court order, but then go on to make exceptions, then you are going against your own official policy. Again, formalities like this do matter, for example even though courts generally never like to give convicted criminals a free pass nor let anyone guilty off the hook, in a lot of higher court cases and even Supreme Court cases the convictions often do get overtuned/ reversed/ vacated because of a technicality or whenever they rule on an intrepretation.

But legal process exists for a reason, policy exists for a reason, following it to the letter is important, because outside of technicial controls, if you really think about it, that's all we have left, that's all anybody ever has in truth. The rule of law exists for that reason, and it is nuetral and blind to sides, as it should be. Protonmail should not elevate itself to the position of being the judiciary and making decisions that are required by a judge via a court order.

I don't recall exactly which post, but on reddit recently Protonmail took the stance that Protonmail is actually better than a judge when it comes down to deciding if data should be handed over or something to that effect. Even if assuming that was the case (which I don't necessarily agree with) if you stop following the legal process and due process, stop waiting for the official court order and instead become your own quasi-judge then what else is there left to safeguard? If you directly talk to trusted "agents" and don't wait for the court order itself, then what is the point? At least in the US the FISA court, though it is a rubber stamp, is still followed in terms of process and procedure. But Protonmail should not take place of the judiciary least you give yourself powers that you don't legally have. You stated that it comes down to be about "trust", but we see so many governments and conglomerates alike (including Google) use the often trite "just trust us" excuse. History has shown that is ripe to be taken advantage of. There are technicial safeguards, and there are legal safeguards. The much promised and long overdue ability to import users own pgp keys (technicial safeguard) is no where to be seen and now it appears the legal safeguards (official court order and nothing less will do) is losing its integrity as well...

This matter potentially is further complicated by the fact that you are promoting other services like VPN in the form of ProtonVPN in addition and conjunction to your email service. The common response to those who don't want their IP address tracked when accessing their email is just to use a VPN. But the concern is for a company that went back and regened on its policy of not tracking/logging email users ("fully anonymous") the precedent has already been set for this to happen again and there is no guarantee the same or similiar won't be effectuated for ProtonVPN as well.

At the very least, this puts Protonmail in the uncomfortable position of having to make a difficult decision in such edge cases where had the user not consolidated all his privacy services into one Proton, and used for example NordVPN when accessing Protonmail as opposed to ProtonVPN when accessing Protonmail, then this wouldn't have even been an issue in the first place. So we are talking about avoiding single points of failure, both technically (when you get DDoS often both Protonmail and ProtonVPN are down or otherwise inaccessible) as well as from a legal or political standpoint (ProtonVPN may choose in the future to start logging IP addresses or handing them over too, which would entirely defeat the point and purpose of using a VPN (in this case ProtonVPN) in order to prevent tracking/logging from Protonmail ) The new revelations of ProtonVPN partnership and close ties to TesoNet does not bode well to instill confidence that ProtonVPN will not be abused in the same manner and fashion that ProtonMail has been watered down, with its privacy scaled back, and its selling points totally obliterated...


AFAIK Protonmail's recent aggregation of statistics in the reports of requests was done in the name of being more efficient and expedient. imho, I think the point that is often missed is that the whole point is it is/was intended to make it difficult and not to make it easy. By changing the policy or at least the way request are being reported and by aggregating them in mass that is one step towards trivializing these requests as just another consequence of doing business and very ironically this is the exact very same justification those in power use for the deployment and implementation and usage of "Mass surveillance" in general, which if I'm not incorrect, is the whole alleged and purported point of your service is to counter that. This is not sliding in the right direction, that much is without doubt.

Proton has in recent times much more heavily pivoted towards the "just trust us" motto, at times and in many critical junctions resorting and reducing it to "its really all comes down to be about trust", and of course convinently taking the defacto stance and the 'a priori' assumption from the company is that anything Proton branded or Proton labeled is thus automatically exempt from scrutiny and almost as if capitalizing on their (imho ill-gotten and undeserved) broad publicity and substituting that in place of the earlier technicial safeguards that were promised to its users from long ago. I find this sort of unwarranted "Exceptionalism" to be toxic to the core essence of true privacy and security.. In place of the long promised and much touted but yet still to be materialized technicial safeguards (ability to export/import own pgp keys, ability to increase key strength, the promise of full open source, a standalone mail client or browser extension, etc etc etc) and the increasingly abandoning of the legal process, watering down of the product and services in terms of privacy first etc and also the sliding down of the slippery slope (giving out data prior to getting court orders, contrarly to Proton's own policy and something that was used as a selling point and product/service differentiation point when pitching to the public and trying to get user adoption and tracking) Proton merely shifts all of these to the side by pivoting towards a new paradigm of blind trust and mindless faith in all things "proton"...

The supreme ultimate irony is that by and through its actions, inactions, and the new facts of revelations, even taking the position most generous and favorable to Protonmail, one can only reasonable conclude that Protonmail is not deserving and does not merit the good faith trust that its users and the general public may have placed in this company, and its products and services. Without this trust, without technicial protections and without legal safeguards, Protonmail is nothing, infact I dare say it is worse than Gmail because it gives those most concerned about privacy the very defintion of false sense of security...