Privacy
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 :)
This instance really wants to dislike Proton.
Proton did some PR for Trump a while ago that didn't get them on everyones good side.
Use monero.
They have a .onion site. Use it always.
And don’t pay with a credit card if you’re committing crimes lmao
Proton was legally ordered by the Swiss justice department to hand over the (severely limited) information about a law breaking organization's account. They had paid for Proton using a credit card instead of the anonymous payment methods Proton offers, and that is what Proton was forced to hand over. It was the organization's bad OpSec, not Proton willingly deanonymizing users.
B..But..Swiss evil?
Hopefully people like you will be able to nip this in the bud before yet another joke of a controversy starts...
You must be new here...
On the one hand, I really like how often Proton's shortcomings are highlighted. This SHOULD be a wake up call that you should never rely on a company to protect you and should instead focus on what you can do to ptorect yourself. And Proton... actually are pretty good in that regard. Connect from a burner/live image computer over public wifi using tor (or something similar) and their free accounts are STILL the gold standard for journalism and whistleblowers.
But the problem is that people are stupid and lazy (and many outlets actively benefit from "Eww, proton is bad. If only they had paid for NordVPN to really protect them from the FBI! ~Note, NordVPN provides no guarantees of protection~ ". So we just get stupidity.
OP's title certainly doesn't help.
Why do you think Proton stores the association between accounts and payment identity?
Many privacy-oriented companies actually accept credit card payments and simply don't store that information.
answer:
proton is snake oil
Really, this headline should be "Organization so poorly organized that they messed up having relatively secure email."
Not at all. Proton doesn't require any personal info at all. But if you pay with a credit card... That has your personal info tied to it. It's their fuck up paying with a credit card. Proton accepts other payment methods that aren't tied to your identity.
Proton is required by law to provide information they have when the courts say so.
Are they required to keep the data?
Not sure about Swiss laws regarding merchant payment card data retention... But they aren't really going to matter with this situation either way. Even if Proton doesn't keep any identifying information directly, the payment processor for sure is going to keep identifying data. Proton will have a confirmation number for the payment being processed, which can be correlated via the payment processor anyway.
Yeah, exactly. They don't make it hard to not tie personal data to them if you want, you just have to actually DO the thing to take advantage of it. These people seemed to think it was magic, which seems to be how a lot of people think Proton or Tuta works.
So I'm not a criminal organization as far as I know, but if I did pay with a credit card originally can that be rectified without deleting and starting over?
Proton uses Chargebee for payments, which has its own data retention policy of essentially "as long as we want to", but Proton does themselves keep limited data like the billing name, and last 4 digits.
Proton's privacy policy says nothing about a pre-set time delay after which they'd delete that data. They only claim that they "reserve our right" to remove your payment information if they think it's no longer valid. So theoretically, that might mean if your card's expiry date has passed, but that's not a confirmation.
The best way to reliably make sure Proton wouldn't have any info on you is to not have ever tied any real information about yourself or your payment info to that account.
Thank you for the information.
@Charger8232 @jrcruciani The bug is between keyboard and chair. It is always a problem to use crédit card.
article in case you can't read it: ~~lemmy.ml/post/44086795~~ edit: better link in a reply.
proton coulda put up a fight, a loud one, for optics sake if nothing else. rolling over on any (and by implication, all) request should be the last straw in their long line of snafus; by way of "death by a thousand cuts", I would never entrust them with anything of importance.
signal demonstrated that you could decouple payment info from user data and a shop that touts the privacy part of their offerings coulda at least mimic such a thing.
edit 2: fuck any and all pay-with-crypto shills and the horse they rode in on.
You cannot put up a fight when ordered to do something by a judge who has jurisdiction over you. You either comply or you’re committing a crime.
article in case you can’t read it: https://lemmy.ml/post/44086795
that link only has two paragraphs of the article; there are 8 more in the full article here on archive.org
Some people in the comment section are really dumb switching to other alternatives thinking that Proton isn't trustworthy because they gave the information despite the organisation not using anonymous currency. What's ironic is that some of these people are switching to those alternatives where you can't even use anonymous currency.
Also, kind of a clickbait title.
Being secure online and being anonymous online is not the same. Proton only promises one of those.