It’s not that Gmail has no security features. According to the policy, the company may share the following with Swiss authorities: last login time, email address, subject lines, sender or recipient email addresses, and IP addresses of incoming messages.įossen says ProtonMail “fights very hard against requests that we feel are inappropriate or invasive.” You can see a running list of such requests here.To understand why secure email is essential, let’s look at what happens when you send emails from a standard provider like Gmail. That claim has now been removed from ProtonMail’s website. “If you take a look at ProtonMail’s marketing and advertising, you will see that they advertise themselves as a privacy protecting mail service … they make a very big deal out of the fact that they don’t log IPs,” Galperin told The Daily Beast. As soon as a crime is committed, privacy protections can be suspended and we're required by Swiss law to answer requests from Swiss authorities.- Andy Yen September 5, 2021Įlectronic Frontier Foundation’s director of cybersecurity Eva Galperin told the Daily Beast that when a service says privacy-first, people often skip over reading details in the terms of service. There was no possibility to appeal this particular request.” “Proton received a legally binding order from Swiss authorities which we are obligated to comply with. In a blog post, ProtonMail CEO and founder Andy Yen explains that his company’s hands were tied. Officials told ProtonMail to cough up the IP information behind this address. While investigating a climate activist, French police found their email address, which was with ProtonMail. “ It quickly became apparent that a lot of people didn’t understand what we meant, so we made some website changes to make things clearer,” he said.

Communications Manager Matt Fossen said the company made these changes for clarity. According to MSN, the company reworded this section of its website. “By default, we do not keep any IP logs which can be linked to your anonymous email account,” its website used to say. But the fact that Swiss law compelled it to reveal this data to authorities has users concerned. That’s because it does not collect IP addresses by default. People who seek anonymity have flocked to ProtonMail in the past.

Who owns proton email