Comment by ncr100

Comment by ncr100 a day ago

10 replies

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Who sponsored this??

Best I could find as a non Swiss:

> Threema and Proton In the daily news of 'SRF', Jean-Louis Biberstein, the deputy head of the federal postal and telecommunications service, said that the requirements for service providers are not tightened, but merely specified. A company like Threema would have the same obligations as before after the revision. Threema contradicts this in a statement from the end of April. The Vüpf revision would force the company to abandon the principle of "only collecting as few data as technically required".

(From auto translation of report about this already failing to proceed.)

Is Federal Post the entity or is it a person, or a group in Swiss government seeking to take authority over information?

netsharc a day ago

Seems like the translation failed to translate the job title properly...

This government page https://www.li.admin.ch/en/ptss says that dude is in charge of the "Legal Affairs and Controlling" division of the "Post and Telecommunications Surveillance Service", and it continues to describe what that division does.

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Calwestjobs a day ago

Small logical question - How can proton deliver mail to you if it does not save anything ?

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  • cfn a day ago

    The contents of the emails are encrypted so you have a normal login plus a key to unencrypt your email locally. They save your encrypted email conyents and your login but not the key and they also don't log your access (I'm assuming here from reading the article).

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    • orhmeh09 21 hours ago

      They might log access in some circumstances, according to their privacy policy (https://proton.me/legal/privacy)

      > 2.5 IP logging: By default, we do not keep permanent IP logs in relation with your Account. However, IP logs may be kept temporarily to combat abuse and fraud, and your IP address may be retained permanently if you are engaged in activities that breach our Terms of Service (e.g. spamming, DDoS attacks against our infrastructure, brute force attacks). The legal basis of this processing is our legitimate interest to protect our service against non-compliant or fraudulent activities. If you enable authentication logging for your Account or voluntarily participate in Proton's advanced security program, the record of your login IP addresses is kept for as long as the feature is enabled. This feature is off by default, and all the records are deleted upon deactivation of the feature. The legal basis of this processing is consent, and you are free to opt in or opt out of that processing at any time in the security panel of your Account. The authentication logs feature records login attempts to your Account and does not track product-specific activity, such as VPN activity.

      See also section 3, "Network traffic that may go through third-parties."

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  • LexiMax a day ago

    To me the value prospect of Proton falls down even before that - how can e-mail ever be a secure medium of communication if only one side of the conversation is secure, given how ubiquitous Google and Outlook are in the space?

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    • pkaeding 21 hours ago

      This is a valid point, but emails between Proton users (or other users of PGP) will not be accessible. And, presumably, it will be harder to see your email if you use Proton, than if you used Google/Outlook if your adversary had to look through everyone else's email to find who corresponded with you.

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    • zadokshi 21 hours ago

      proton account to proton account.

      > how can e-mail ever be a secure medium

      Email can be secure, it’s just that the big US players can’t or won’t agree to proton like privacy.

      I am curious to know what is behind these big US companies being so anti privacy.

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      • MYEUHD 10 hours ago

        > Email can be secure, it’s just that the big US players can’t or won’t agree to proton like privacy.

        Protonmail is not standards compilant. You can't login to your protonmail account from Thunderbird or k9 mail. Yes, they have an IMAP bridge, but it's proprietary / requires a paid account. Thus you're locked in to the official protonmail clients

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      • jeffparsons 19 hours ago

        > I am curious to know what is behind these big US companies being so anti privacy.

        Google has an email service so that it can ingest all your communication and use it to better target ads. If Google didn't have access to the content of your emails, there wouldn't be much point to Gmail.

        Microsoft mostly cares about enterprises, and enterprises generally don't want E2EE email; they have legal requirements to retain e-mail of employees, and have their own reasons to want to be able to access employee emails sometimes.

        Apple... I don't know where they stand on this.

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