I’ve been using Proton Mail and VPN for a while now, and I’m just wondering how everyone else feels about them. I have this kind of inherent alight distrust of them just because they seem like they offer a lot for free and kind of have a Big Tech vibe about them, but there’s nothing for me to really substantiate that distrust with, its mostly just a feeling. That being said, I do use their services as mentioned and they work pretty well, even on the free teir. 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?
‘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.
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?
The service could not appeal because a Swiss law had actually been broken and because “legal tools for serious crimes” were used.
Yep under Swiss law he was a criminal, we may not agree with the law but unfortunately that’s the case here
Yes. It’s not really Proton’s fault, but definitely unattractive to a user/customer
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.
For my threat model and use case, I trust them.
I don’t completely trust any “privacy-focused” company, but I trust proton a lot more than most others.
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.
Depends. Are you on a wanted list?
😀
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
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.
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.
Proton can be anonymous, yes, just like every other email service. I think OP was wondering more about how they protect your privacy when you’re using them non-anonymously. I could be wrong though.
But yeah, don’t use email if you don’t trust your email provider. Setting up your own email server for receiving mail isn’t too hard. Most ISPs don’t block incoming traffic on port 25, only outgoing traffic. It’s the sending part that sucks when you run your own server. Even if your ISP doesn’t block outbound port 25, your IP is probably already on several spam blacklists. :(
But yeah, don’t use email if you don’t trust your email provider.
Not sure how much more I can simplify this: The “if you don’t trust your email provider” has no place in this sentence. Don’t use email if you need the content of your messages to be private. If someone’s looking at Proton because they think it’ll keep their emails private, then yes, that’s a bad idea. But that’s not because of the “Proton” part of that sentence; it’s because of the “emails” part, and setting up your own SMTP service will do nothing to remedy that (in fact it’ll make things worse because it’ll put your own IP address into the “Received-By” headers of every email you send out).
If you’re communicating with someone you know who’s also running their own email server, there is no problem with using email. Email is a good protocol, and it runs over TLS.
I’m not trying to argue or anything, but I think you should read this for a quite good overview of the issues involved with trying to secure SMTP email. You can also read any number of expert opinions saying the same thing, if you don’t believe me or that article.
If you’re communicating with someone you know who’s also running their own email server, there is no problem with using email.
So, basically, never. I’ve run several SMTP servers in my time. I’m having trouble thinking of an example of when I might have been communicating from one of them to someone else who also ran their own secure SMTP server. If you’re trying to set up a secure end-to-end communication channel with one specific person which involves work on both your ends, it’d be way easier and more secure to use some other transport protocol at that point.
Email is a good protocol
It is. 100%. Sorry if I gave the impression I didn’t think it was. For all its age and some amount of minor stone-age baggage it brought with it, SMTP is genuinely quite well-designed and still serves its purpose 43+ years later, which is incredibly impressive. That purpose is, insecure but reliable and interoperable communication.
it runs over TLS.
Yeah, so does your HTTP connection with Proton. That doesn’t mean the end-result system keeps your messages secure, any more than using HTTPS means Proton is secure.
You can read the article I linked to above, but basically the short version is that email is by the design of the protocol subject to being stored or transmitted unencrypted at various intermediate places as it’s being sent around, in ways that are by the design of the protocol impossible to prevent.
You’re not required to agree with me; you can think what you want, but that’s how I see it.
I mean, pretty much everything in that article applies to HTTP too. SMTP basically always runs through TLS now. If you ever get anything over an unencrypted connection, it’s almost 100% likely to just be spam. So mostly that article is complaining about your email being unencrypted on your provider’s server. Well, your Facebook messages are stored unencrypted too. So are your Slack messages. And Discord. And Twitter DMs.
I wrote and run the email service Port87, so I’m pretty familiar with how this all works. Email through a third party is about as secure as any other messenger. It’s not like Outlook.com is any less trustworthy than Discord.
I don’t need to trust anyone to use Port87, because I wrote it, but my users have to trust me, just like Google’s users had to trust me when I worked there, and Facebook’s users had to trust me when I worked there. You trust thousands of people when you use these companies’ products.
If someone is looking for end to end encrypted communication, I agree, they are probably better suited by another protocol. SMTP is really good at what it’s designed to do.
…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.
Tor Browser only protects your IP address.
Emails received from outside senders are only end to end encrypted if the sender is using OpenPGP or S/MIME. Otherwise, Proton receives them in plain text (the TLS encryption is terminated at their SMTP server). They promise that they don’t look at them before encrypting them for storage, but you have to trust that promise.
Injecting malicious code means either XSS or if their build pipeline gets hacked. These companies release builds through a pipeline (usually download source -> download dependencies -> build from source -> package -> sign -> notarize (for Apple) -> release), and anywhere along that pipeline can be vulnerable. They might update a dependency that got hacked and now they’re hacked too. One of their build servers might get hacked and now they’ve released a malicious build. You’re trusting them to verify not only their code and their build servers, but also every dependency update. That’s potentially millions of lines of code per year to vet. It’s probably fine, but you’re still trusting them.
As for whether an attack is their fault, it really doesn’t matter. The end result is your leaked data. They could do everything they possibly can to protect you, but they could still get hacked. You are trusting them when you use their service. I believe they’re trustworthy, which is why I’ve been using their service for years.
A note about me: I know all of this because I have worked in big tech for ~11 years (Facebook, Google, then LinkedIn), I wrote an end to end encrypted messenger (called Tunnelgram, now discontinued), and I wrote my own email service over the past two years (called Port87).
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.
For that one instance, not doing so would have been illegal and probably gotten them hit with a major penalty.
Any email you send 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.
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
Numbers 2 and 3 act like these are things that you can easily just stop
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My friend doesnt have a smartphone, so we comnunicate via email ^^
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.
