No, Proton does not disclose its users' data

This is a text automatically translated from Italian. If you appreciate our work and if you like reading it in your language, consider a donation to allow us to continue doing it and improving it.

As you know, we don't like to talk too much about news and current affairs since we are not a newspaper nor do we try to be. When we publish news we tend to try to do it in a positive way without catastrophism or clickbait. Unfortunately we know that it is not a common practice and yesterday many of you may have read the news that Proton discloses its users' data relaunched (Archive) mainly from a blog called Restore Privacy. The news is substantially false or at least the title is decidedly clickbait and scammer.

Restore Privacy is generally a good blog but he is not entirely new to these methods and slightly clickbait titles ¹. It is also a blog that actively sponsors various VPNs through coupons and affiliations: with this we do not mean that this news is purposely relaunched in a certain way and to attract the public but everyone will be able to freely draw their own considerations. We are sure of one thing, however: always read the articles and don't stop at the titles, especially when they contain excessively strong and captivating statements.

No, Proton does not disclose its users' data

However, we wanted to reassure those who follow us because we don't need clicks and therefore we limit ourselves to reporting this news, trying to be as objective as possible.

The news, which we will not comment on, is that for a terrorist threat involving alleged threats to the King of Spain, Europol has moved to obtain information on the alleged culprit. What he could get from Proton, by order of a Swiss court, is the recovery email address that this person had entered into his Proton account deliberately. We say deliberately because the recovery email address it's not mandatory.

That recovery email address it was an email from Apple with firstname.lastname as the username ².

The news is important, but for other reasons

This news therefore tells us some important things, which are not those of the title of the well-known blog but which are, in our opinion:

• Proton protects privacy but not anonymity. For theanonymity they are needed Always certain actions by a person who needs them. For this reason here on Le Alternative we do not talk about anonymity but about privacy protection. The idea of being invisible because you are behind a VPN or because you are using Proton or Signal is wrong and we will always repeat it.
• Use services like Proton or Signal and in general ask for respect for your privacy by using systems with End-to-end encryption it does not justify illegal actions. It's the psychological trick that is used to try to make us digest rubbish like Chat Control (or other), we must not blow in this direction because the consequences are potentially devastating. Those who use Proton are not immune to the law and must respect it it is therefore normal, and it could not be otherwise, that Proton is obliged to cooperate with the Swiss courts.
• It is naive to be surprised that Proton collaborates and is obliged to collaborate with Swiss law or, for those who purposely want to fuel the climate of terror, as cowards.
• This news should make us reflect on the fact that Proton, as happened in the past with Signal ³, was only able to hand over the recovery email address to the judiciary because Proton cannot decrypt email data even on request. The recovery email address is not required as mandatory also because this information can theoretically be handed over upon order of a Swiss court, as terrorism is against the law in Switzerland.
• This news given in this way is bad for the whole community and also for the objective because it spreads background noise and fuels the so-called FUD which does not allow sensible, calculated and correct reasoning but is based solely on fueling doubts and fears which man, unfortunately, often feeds on even without realizing it.

Yes, we will continue to suggest Proton

We created this article in the hope that we can help people with doubts and fears. There are those who unfortunately fuel them unconsciously and those who unfortunately profit from them. There are also those who feed them specifically to increase background noise and make it difficult to distinguish the truth from conspiracy theories, making everything deliberately more complex.

Proton is just a company and obviously not perfect but, unlike Gmail (or Microsoft) for example, it does not collect data nor do you have the ability to access our emails in any way. The little data available is minimized as much as possible and it is up to the person who needs anonymity to behave accordingly without hoping to be invisible just because maybe "I use Proton and a VPN".

We are keen not to sensationalize and as far as we are concerned the story on this topic ends here. If you have friends who have doubts on this topic also due to blogs that perhaps continue to push a certain narrative, you can send them this article. Thank you!

This tag @loyal alternatives is used to automatically send this post to Feddit and allow anyone on the fediverse to comment on it.

1. ProtonMail Gives Up Logs on User, Then Scrubs Website of No IP Logging Claims | ProtonMail Complied with 5,957 Data Requests in 2022 – Still Secure and Private?[↩]
2. Arweave[↩]
3. Grand jury subpoena for Signal user data, Central District of California[↩]

Join communities