this post was submitted on 11 Jul 2024
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Privacy
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I think that you should look at our world realistically. You can't just go "fuck the goverment" mode and remain active as a corporation. Proton shared as less info as possible, but they couldn't refuse to share it at all.
Good point! Trusting law-abiding corporations to protect your privacy is fundamentally a bad idea, and as such, promoting Proton as a private alternative to Google (compared to say, self hosting on a bulletproof VPS like buyvm) is harming users and promoting corporate propaganda.
You can't trust anyone, that's true. But self-hosting your own 100% bulletproof MailCow server on 1984 VPS, which you pay for in Monero won't make you any more private, because emails you send still end up on Gmail inboxes.
It's simply unneccesary for normal user with not so high threat model. And if you're a political activist, then why even using email instead of normal privacy communication solutions like SimpleX, Session or Briar?
How does sending mail to gmail affect my privacy? If I'm sending encrypted mail to gmail, only that one mail is compromised once decrypted on gmail's servers. Any mail sent to any other server is fine. Do you only send mail to gmail users or something?
smtp is no better or worse than xmpp, irc or whatever else if you have end to end encryption. Proton decided to lie in their privacy policy that they don't log IPs, which ended up fucking this activist because they started logging after a sneaky targeted court order, and then edited their privacy policy after the fact like the slimeballs they are.
What? How? Most private email providers only support encryption like Proton to Proton or Tuta to Tuta. Emails sended to anything else stay unencrypted. And there's no way you're going to use this stupid password protection everytime, because if you do, then why would you even use email?
Almost everyone uses Gmail, Outlook, Yahoo or whatever. Unfortunately, not everyone are privacy concious like you and me.
No, it's not. Emails should not be used by political activists to communicate. Even the best email providers like Proton or Tuta can't give you 100% protection and this activist arrest is the perfect example.
Email is the obsolete protocol, that should only be used to register on random websites and get authorization codes. For everything else you should use secure messaging apps.
If e2e encryption is too hard, you can always mail encrypted tarballs or something. Either way, what led to the arrest was Proton secretly storing IP addresses against their privacy policy because of a court order, it has nothing to do with mail or smtp.