Back in January this year, the company's homepage stated: "No personal information is required to create your secure email account. These are all standard unencrypted information from email headers, inherent to the SMTP email specification, though it appears that ProtonMail's previous promises about user information logging were a bit over-generous. The IP address incoming messages originated from.This statement, while bold, seems to be borne out by the service's privacy policy which states that it can access the following user information: ProtonMail has said in the past that it does not collect user data and implements end-to-end encryption, and repeated that over the weekend, saying: "Under no circumstances however, can our encryption be bypassed, meaning emails, attachments, calendars, files, etc, cannot be compromised by legal orders." It is therefore imperative to go through the tor network (or at least a VPN) when using a ProtonMail mailbox (or another secure mailbox) if you want to guarantee sufficient security. ProtonMail responded to this request by providing the IP address and the fingerprint of the browser used by the collective. They therefore sent a requisition (via EUROPOL) to the Swiss company managing the messaging system in order to find out the identity of the creator of the address. The police also noticed that the collective communicated via a ProtonMail email address. So received a legal request from Europol through Swiss authorities to provide information about Youth for Climate action in Paris, they provided the IP address and information on the type of device used to the police Īt the time of writing, the company's website said: "We believe privacy and security are universal values which cross borders."Īfter data from ProtonMail was handed to the Swiss and then French police, the author of a left-wing political activists' blog in France wrote ( en français) that a group called Youth for Climate had been targeted:
Police were executing a warrant obtained by French authorities and served on their Swiss counterparts through Interpol, according to social media rumours that ProtonMail chief exec Andy Yen acknowledged to The Register. Encrypted email service ProtonMail has become embroiled in a minor scandal after responding to a legal request to hand over to Swiss police a user's IP address and details of the devices he used to access his mailbox – resulting in the netizen's arrest.
0 kommentar(er)
