Once again, massive hypothetical. Is there any proof this is even remotely the case? Has Switzerland's government suddenly decided centuries of consumer privacy go out the window and are asking to do such a thing or even implying they would? Yes, it's possible, but, once again, there's absolutely no indication that this is even remotely going to happen. At a certain point, hypotheticals like this just plain aren't helpful.
You claim they're "a scam". That has certain implications, including willful misuse of data/money. Can you prove they're actually "a scam", or is all of this just posturing because they aren't running their company in the exact way you would want them to?
Why do we have to engage in hypotheticals about whether or not anyone will act in a morally upstanding way when we could instead design systems which don't require trust at all? Or better yet, use estalbished systems which don't require trust?
Because the general population doesn't give two shits about truly trustless systems, they want "good enough". And, while you and a few others might care about it, that's not enough to actually pay the bills, especially when designing trustless systems costs more money than an alternative. Your hopes and dreams don't pay for infrastructure, unfortunately.
So, once again, what about Protonmail makes them a scam, other than not doing things exactly the way you want them to? I've seen absolutely no indication they're a scam from any of your comments or their replies, and your grievances seem to boil down to one feature (the bridge) being paid-for. That's hardly scam-worthy.
I'm not talking to the general population, I'm talking to Hacker News. And among the general population, people who really need encryption are not necessarily going to know how to use it, but need to understand what kinds of guarantees are being made to be safe.
A service which makes you pay to extract your own data with standard tools is a scam in my book. If you don't support IMAP and outgoing SMTP you can't even call yourself an email provider in my book.
You might not be talking to the general population, but ProtonMail is at the end of the day a service provider intended for the general population. They can't sustain their business on security-conscious people alone, so their decisions are going to be targeted towards the general population to some degree. Whether you like it or not, you have to think from the perspective of the general population because nobody is going to cater to the incredibly specific niche you live in. Even within HN, your arguments represent a minority. I highly doubt even a double-digit percentage of the HN readerbase cares about this issue as deeply as you do.
Then your book is flawed and doesn't align with the actual definitions of "scam" and "email provider". Especially for the former, there's a much higher bar, and your arguments are far from meeting it.
>Then your book is flawed and doesn't align with the actual definitions of "scam" and "email provider". Especially for the former, there's a much higher bar, and your arguments are far from meeting it.
Let's define the requirements for the former, then. If someone claims to offer a service they don't, is that a scam? I think so. Now if we can justify the, by your own admission, weaker requirements for calling Protonmail "not an email provider", we've established they're a scam.
An "email provider" that doesn't provide IMAP and SMTP isn't an email provider any more than Facebook's proprietary "free internet but only on Facebook" is "internet service".
You claim they're "a scam". That has certain implications, including willful misuse of data/money. Can you prove they're actually "a scam", or is all of this just posturing because they aren't running their company in the exact way you would want them to?