If the owner of the standard notes will now be a proton, doesn’t that contradict this principle? I have a proton email account but I don’t want it linked to my standard notes account. I don’t strongly trust companies that offer packaged services like google or Microsoft. I prefer to have one service from one company. I am afraid that now I will have to change where I save my notes. What do you guys think about this?
There’s a lot of metadata Proton passes around, and two of their oldest flagship products (email and VPN) require you to put a lot of trust in one company. For email, you trust them to encrypt them without snooping. For VPN, you trust them to not collect logs about where you’re going.
And in the former case, they were compelled to give up at least a little data in the not-so-distant past.
It doesn’t matter what is being discussed, if its about proton the email incident gets brought up.
Here is the deal. No major company is going to break the law for its users. Had the activist been using proton vpn to create and access their email, Proton would not have had the info they were forced to give up. The takeaway from the story is bad opsec is usually what gets people caught whether its activists or hackers.
Whether you use Proton or someone else you will need to trust that service. If you don’t trust them, don’t use them. Its that simple, no need for conjured up FUD excuses.
I bring up “the email incident” because it’s a reminder that Proton may record stuff that’s not encrypted, which includes the vast majority of emails.
And it’s not to say that you wouldn’t trust it with one individual service, but whether it’s wise to trust it with so many services at once, from a security, privacy, and even monetary perspective.
Not every concern is FUD, and I think you’ll start seeing diminishing returns every time you repeat it.
Not every concern is but ones where concern is based solely on fear and hypotheticals are. This all eggs in one basket line of reasoning is FUD and has no real bearing in reality.
Even this email issue, it really has nothing to do with if you should trust proton in terms of OPs post. If you really believe Proton is going to sell you out, you wouldn’t use them anyway and Proton following the laws is something every legit business is going to do, not something specific to Proton. If you have the threat model of an activist you need to careful about your opsec as i explained in a previous comment.
What? If protonmail collects any metadata, why do you assume protonVPN doesn’t?
Proton can see my traffic. I already know that. Any vpn provider you use could. Its not that i trust proton implicitly its that i trust them more then my ISP that would be able to see it if i did not use a vpn. Couple that with their record of audits and im not sure what else you could expect from them.
You wrote that if the activists used proton VPN to register their mail account, proton would not have the information he needed to pass on. It’s not true cause they would probably have the same metadata about them.