If you pay Proton Mail for a service, they may hand over the payment data in response to a court order: https://www.404media.co/proton-mail-helped-fbi-unmask-anonymous-stop-cop-city-protestor/
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@evacide This...seems perfectly normal? Like, what was Proton's alternative here?
@chiraag@mastodon.online @evacide@hachyderm.io Idk, to get shut down? People are pretending as if Tuta or Mailbox or other email provider would be different here.
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@tragivictoria @evacide that’s what an AI crawler would say
@mkljczk@fediverse.pl @evacide@hachyderm.io You’re absolutely right — you got me!
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@evacide@hachyderm.io what’s the full article? Because I am certainly not gonna make an account just to read this
@tragivictoria @evacide I will say that 404Media retains basically no info on you. They ask a name (you can lie if you want) and an email (if you're able, you can use a forward address to obscure your actual email). They don't save passwords, they just email a temp login code. And if you don't wanna risk being tracked across the site or the web, you can clear your site cookies afterwards to logout.
Still totally valid not to make the account, but i recently bit the bullet and did it, I was surprised how little info they accepted that might accidentally get leaked.
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@tragivictoria @evacide I will say that 404Media retains basically no info on you. They ask a name (you can lie if you want) and an email (if you're able, you can use a forward address to obscure your actual email). They don't save passwords, they just email a temp login code. And if you don't wanna risk being tracked across the site or the web, you can clear your site cookies afterwards to logout.
Still totally valid not to make the account, but i recently bit the bullet and did it, I was surprised how little info they accepted that might accidentally get leaked.
@riverpunk@defcon.social @evacide@hachyderm.io so if they accept little to no info, why they require it in the first place?
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@riverpunk@defcon.social @evacide@hachyderm.io so if they accept little to no info, why they require it in the first place?
@tragivictoria @evacide idk. I doubt they're selling it on the data brokerage market though, if that's what you're worried about.
I suspect it's a marketing on-ramp to convince avid readers to purchase a paid subscription (some articles have an actual paywall). Or maybe it's anti-scraping? Idk.
FWIW, they tend to be pretty radically pro-privacy, and they're like a 4 person crew, so pretty small independent news organization.
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If you pay Proton Mail for a service, they may hand over the payment data in response to a court order: https://www.404media.co/proton-mail-helped-fbi-unmask-anonymous-stop-cop-city-protestor/
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@evacide so the only real solution is to run your own mail server, because corporations will always do this if pressured?
@caitp I guess in theory you could find a service that will shut down before complying (ala 2013 Lavabit), but I can't imagine there are many of them at any given time because, well, they'll shut down (by design) on a frequent basis. Not sure if better or worse than the headache of running it yourself. @evacide
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It is possible to make it work even to google and hotmail but it takes dedication and constant upkeep sadly. And it does not anonymize you at all, rather the opposite.
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@evacide I've been following the articles on this, and was curious -- you would know this better than I -- does it sound like they were in a position where they had a legal alternative?
@cliffle @evacide All companies have to comply with the jurisdiction in which they are registered. In this case they complied with Swiss law, not the FBI directly, so the headline seems a bit misleading.
The takeaway is: If you pay for any service in a traceable way, you are not anonymous. If you want to be anonymous, consider cash or Monero.
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If you pay Proton Mail for a service, they may hand over the payment data in response to a court order: https://www.404media.co/proton-mail-helped-fbi-unmask-anonymous-stop-cop-city-protestor/
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@steff A lot of people use Proton Mail because they think its location in Switzerland gives their data greater legal protections than it might have in the US or the EU. In some cases, this may be true, but as you can see in this example, these protections are not absolute.
@evacide@hachyderm.io Exactly. There’s an odd assumption that simply offshoring services increases privacy or anonymity when the reality is that it may leave one more exposed to the global panopticon. Certainly, I think there are other questions here about how Proton’s operational policies are not optimized to protect anonymity; yet, I feel it’s important to understand that maintaining security and privacy goes far beyond simply choosing a ‘secure provider’, but requires ongoing diligence to mitigate your operational and legal risks.
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