If they sold it to the government then I want my cut of the name money, if I'm on that list. If every piece of crap business/corporation is requiring me to give my name and then sells my name, I deserve at least 50% of that dosh! Class action anyone?
this post was submitted on 22 Dec 2025
100 points (88.5% liked)
Privacy
43957 readers
708 users here now
A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.
Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.
In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.
Some Rules
- Posting a link to a website containing tracking isn't great, if contents of the website are behind a paywall maybe copy them into the post
- Don't promote proprietary software
- Try to keep things on topic
- If you have a question, please try searching for previous discussions, maybe it has already been answered
- Reposts are fine, but should have at least a couple of weeks in between so that the post can reach a new audience
- Be nice :)
Related communities
much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)
founded 6 years ago
MODERATORS
Any way to know if we are among the 32k+ disclosed users ?
I don't get why people think that any company for that matter would go to jail for a random dude online. They do hand over metadata and everything else is encrypted. Not even Proton can access that data. When served with a court order they have to hand it over. Now if it were GMail, they'd probably make a collage with your pics and share them. That's the difference.
Don't collect data and there's nothing to handover https://mullvad.net/en/blog/mullvad-vpn-was-subject-to-a-search-warrant-customer-data-not-compromised
Basically comparing apples to oranges. Mullvad just does one thing or maybe two if you include the browser. Proton operates on a different scale. There's going to be some data generated if you expect to use the whole suite without running into issues. I'll accept your argument when mullvad operates on a similar scale with the same opsec.
I'm not buying 'they need data cos they offer more products'. The companies have made different choices in how they build their software.
I'm using Proton for privacy, not anonymity. I've literally put my name and surname in my email address. I don't care if someone knows that me is me.
But I do care that no one is reading and/or automatically processing my mails.
Same. My real name is on mine too. Everything you give an email to that isn't Google is one more piece of data Google doesn't have presumably. If those corrupt bastards collect the aggregate anyways, that still costs them money. If it's automated, guess what? Aggregating our data still costs money, and data centers are expensive to maintain. Every little but matters.
Wasn't their whole marketing point that they'll have nothing meaningful to give out since everything's properly E2E encrypted? Not sure how much the compliance rate matters when the provided data is useless. (They would need to comply in order to remain legally operating..)
Stunner legal entity follows the law...
Fellas your VPN is not going to break the law for you.
Yep. That’s why when shopping for services, more weight should be put on what data they retain. It doesn’t matter if they comply with laws in the country they operate in if they have no data to hand over.
I believe Australian laws state that if the government requests your data and they can't hand it over, they're required to build a method to track you. So practically speaking if you want true privacy you'd need to use the Tor network.
Australian states are working on laws to impose fines on companies that don't provide data in cases of 'vilification', under the pretense of catching 'anonymous nazis' or whatever. We're cooked
Also if you call someone a nazi here, they sue you for defamation
Proton’s privacy policies state that they retain unencrypted metadata (addresses, timestamps, etc.) which are required to provide the service. This information may be disclosed to law enforcement. However, the actual content in your account is largely end-to-end encrypted. Law enforcement might request it, but without the keys to decrypt it they won’t be able to read your data.
Metadata tracking should be very concerning to anyone who cares about privacy because it inherently builds a social graph. The server operators, or anyone who gets that data, can see a map of who is talking to whom. The content is secure, but the connections are not.
Being able to map out a network of relations is incredibly valuable. An intelligence agency can take the map of connections and overlay it with all the other data they vacuum up from other sources, such as location data, purchase histories, social media activity. If you become a “person of interest” for any reason, they instantly have your entire social circle mapped out.
Worse, the act of seeking out encrypted communication is itself a red flag. It’s a perfect filter: “Show me everyone paranoid enough to use crypto.” You’re basically raising your hand. So, in a twisted way, tools for private conversations that share their metadata with third parties, are perfect machines for mapping associations and identifying targets such as political dissidents.
with email, the meta data leaking is at the protocol level, email is comically insecure and no matter funny encryption you do with pgp the protocol itself will leak data, and Proton's advertisments as a secure private email provider are misleading in a fundemental level thanks to this, I do not see how any email provider could fix this other than making a whole new standard for an email-like protocol
email is a legacy tool that needs to be phased out and a sane better replacement has to be made, untill that there is little to no hope to not leaking email metadata to some degree since email is effectively required to create accounts in most web services
yup email is just fundamentally not the right tool for this
The yanks were drone striking people in Iraq and Afganistan based on who was calling who, I'm certain they still do this kind of thing too. Your uncle's an important guy and he calls you for your birthday? kablamo
exactly
I don’t disagree with you, but sending and receiving emails requires transmission of unencrypted metadata. There’s no easy way around it
Right, which really suggests that email is not the right medium if you want genuine privacy.
Tbf I'm unaware of a messaging service be it chat or email or whatever that leaks no metadata, afaik they all kind of have to by nature of needing to know at least where the message is supposed to go, if not where it came from, too.
Like, if Bob messages Lisa, the service has to at least know to deliver the message to lisa, even if it didn't also that it's from Bob.
If you know of one I'm curious though!
My threat model is not mostly concerned with gov. That could change but anyb way we can make it harder and more expensive or to take data or just created competition for Google is start in the correct direction. Just don't do anything important on Proton.
Right, understanding what your threat model is important. Then you can make a conscious choice regarding the trade offs of using a particular service, and you understand what your risks are.
No business is going to violate court orders on behalf of their users. What people need to learn is to not use the same provider for everything, vpn and email especially should be on different services.
Without a link to the report or any other justification information this reads like a hit piece. The other important item to understand is what information actually could be released.
As much as I dunk on proton for their CEOs idiocy and lack of Linux support, I also push for accuracy and infographics are dangerous in that space.
I'll see if I can link the relevant info once I get home and am not on a phone anymore.
The data they can hand is your acc creation information and which IP accessed the email. They can't hand email content because of zero knowledge encryption, and they can't hand VPN traffic because it's not logged and they can't be forced to log it. https://protonvpn.com/support/no-logs-vpn/
I have started using message.casa.