[streetfighter64]

Sorry, perhaps the takeaway is clearer when you see the full quote [0]. I omitted it for space, here's the relevant part

> Third, let's talk about what was actually disclosed. No emails were handed over. No message content. No metadata about who the user communicated with. The only information Proton could provide [...]

Yes, paying by crypto prevents Proton from disclosing your identity that way. Is there anything preventing Proton from disclosing the email content or metadata? Do they claim they won't disclose that? Clearly they do allow themselves to disclose metadata [1]

> For example, in ransomware cases, we can preserve information about which victims contacted the suspect, so that victims can be notified.

So, "just don't pay with a credit card" comes with the additional caveat of "don't email somebody you don't want the FBI to know you emailed". Whether you also need to "don't write anything you don't want the FBI to know", I haven't investigated further, but you could perhaps look that up yourself. I will just assume that to be the case based on what I've seen.

[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/privacy/comments/1rltej7/comment/o8... [1] https://proton.me/legal/law-enforcement

[Yiin]

There are limits of what you can encrypt, in all of the cases of proton being critiqued for its compliance with law I haven't seen any instance of them being able to disclose email content, where metadata is "who we're sending email to", which is, I assume, not encryptable if you want an usable service. That being said, the quote does make your pov clearer, thank you for that.

[redat00]

> Is there anything preventing Proton from disclosing the email content or metadata?

Mmh.. The fact that it is encrypted client-side ? I mean the code is open-source fgs. [0][1][2]

[0]https://github.com/ProtonMail/android-mail [1]https://github.com/ProtonMail/ios-mail [3]https://github.com/ProtonMail/WebClients

[streetfighter64]

Yeah, if you trust that they will never push a backdoor to your client on the request of Swiss law enforcement. It's a web app "fgs".

They also admit to scanning all mail to and from non-Proton accounts "for spam". So what's stopping them from one day adding a small if statement that just writes that data to disk, for specific "interesting" users?

Regarding metadata, I sure hope you have nothing to hide in the below emphasized:

> Account Activity: Due to limitations of the SMTP protocol, we have access to the following email metadata: *sender and recipient email addresses, the IP address incoming messages originated from, attachment name, message subject, and message sent and received times*. We do NOT have access to encrypted message content, but unencrypted messages sent from external providers to your Account, or from Proton Mail to external unencrypted email services, are scanned for spam and viruses to pursue the legitimate interest of protecting the integrity of our Services and users. Such inbound messages are scanned for spam in memory, and then encrypted and written to disk. We do not possess the technical ability to scan the content of the messages after they have been encrypted. We also have access to the following records of Account activity: number of messages sent, amount of storage space used, total number of messages, last login time. User data is never used for advertising purposes.

[redat00]

https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc5321

[streetfighter64]

Please quote where in that document the answer to my question is:

> Is there anything preventing Proton from disclosing the email content or metadata?

Also please link me to the source code of Proton's server-side code, so I can audit their scanning of all incoming and outgoing mail, to verify it's not logging them. What you linked above is just the clients.

[Yiin]

that's why they have independent audits.