this post was submitted on 06 Mar 2026
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they shouldn't pretend to protect your privacy if they can't
one time they did this and only then after changed their website where it said they wouldn't log your info
https://technologymagazine.com/cloud-and-cybersecurity/protonmail-under-fire-over-data-handover
Payments are very different. Any company is required to keep track of their finances, the tax authorities don't fuck around. If you electronically pay for something and expect anonymity, you are not very, um, educated. If you feel like you need their paid plans, pay cash and only ever access it through TOR running Tails. I feel like that's a reasonable level of opsec for most activists.
You know that, I know that, people here probably know that.
But out in the real world where people are doing real world activism and are concerned about real world problems, they don't necessarily know that. They are concerned about a whole lot of things that are not digital infrastructure and technology.
They should be able to trust a service that promises security and anonymity for payment. In particular one that is touted as well renowned.
Especially since other groups can manage it properly, e.g. Signal can't link transactions to a specific user account
Yeah, there are plenty of services that manage exactly this. Most prominently VPNs and Mullvad is battle proven by the swedish police department.
Should is doing too much work here. Its been doing too much work for our society as a whole. While I agree with your idealist sensibilities I regret to inform you that this needs to stop, you cannot trust institutions built on corporate profit seeking. Like that's just a hard no, it changes on a dime to seek profit somewhere else
Hence the romanticism of migrating to Proton needs to be argued every time somebody brings it up. Obviously Proton VPN too is easily compromised. Teach people to spend their money on Mullvad or another service that is able to decouple payment from service account activities.
Seeing this comment downvoted in a privacy community is a little disheartening.
Comments like "If you electronically pay for something and expect anonymity, you are not very, um, educated" is technically true in a descriptive sense maybe, but in a prescriptive sense, the comment tells us "You should have known what were know. You didn't, and you deserve what you got for that."
It seems unhelpful to assume our knowledge is automatically universal, and not a result of some combination of luck and circumstance.
this is victim blaming
not every activist is a tax attorney, their misleading advertising and the faulty standing in the community is the reason this awesome anti cop city activitist got repressions
Marketing claims don't absolve you from doing your due diligence.
"Victim blaming" is an inherently stupid concept, because it relies on the premise that: