What Proton sell you is reduction of anxiety. But that's a lie.

The whole idea of encrypted email is pointless. There's absolutely no guarantee it's encrypted in transit or encrypted at rest on any machines it transits through unless you encapsulate the messages with PGP and then you still leave a trail of envelopes everywhere. Any government who wants your data will come round and beat it out of you or the provider as best as they can. And if you have the pay the provider, as evidenced here, they can point to you and then beat you for it. Beating being metaphorical or otherwise.

Use any old shitty email provider and make sure you can move off it quickly if you need to. Standard IMAP, not weird ass proprietary stuff like proton. Think carefully what you do and say. Use a side channel for anything that actually requires security.

You can pay proton anonymously according to some other comments here...

Thanks for pointing that out. I always do too. I'm always surprised how many people here aren't aware of this.

As a long time Proton customer...I am fairly certain Proton has always been completely upfront that they will comply with lawful requests for information from the Swiss authorities, if response is obligated by Swiss law. Therefore this isn't especially surprising.

The key is and always has been to make sure that someone like Proton simply doesn't have the information so they can't give it away.

This is just impossible. If they're going to be sending your email to gmail then they need to see what's in it. So they will have the data at some point. You have to trust their brown eyes that they don't look at it while it's going through their inbound and outbound servers. But they're selling it as a technical protection, not a trust-based one.

Personally, if you want private Comms, just don't use email. The protocol is just not suitable.

Exactly, you can use bitcoin, even cash. You can even add credits with PayPal or a credit card, in which case Proton (I assume) won't remember your payment data. But if you attach credit card info permanently to your account then it can be retrieved.

I don't think any commercial entity can be trusted to break the law on behalf of customers who only pay a small fee each

In this case, it was Swiss courts who forced them to comply, not foreign courts.

And from what little I can tell from the article, it was account payment data, not content from the account.

Proton was never designed or advertised to resist this kind of threat.

I wasn't even aware of anything around Proton and specific US political parties. Thank you for your post, as it led me to some searching.

The single most useful link I found was this Reddit thread:

https://www.reddit.com/r/ProtonMail/comments/1i2nz9v/on_poli...

Good enough reason to never trust them.

In trying to check this claim (I thought Proton did sensible things), I found that the submitted news article is not new at all:

> [Proton's] homepage touts that “With Proton, your data belongs to you, not tech companies, governments, or hackers.” However, [...] Proton previously handed over an IP address at the request of French authorities made via Europol to Swiss police. Yen wrote a Twitter post at the time, stating, “Proton must comply with Swiss law. 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.” ---https://theintercept.com/2025/01/28/proton-mail-andy-yen-tru...

Big surprise: swiss company complies with swiss law!

And the same happened now, quoting the part of the submission that you can read without signing up:

> privacy-focused email provider Proton Mail handed over payment data related to a Stop Cop City email account to the Swiss government, which handed it to the FBI.

Anyway, regarding your claim, it's a whole rabbit hole of statements they made but broadly speaking it sounds like you're right: Vance supported legislation which Proton campaigned for and, subsequently (as of 2025-01), Proton loves the US Republican Party, believing they would stand up for 'the little guy'. To be fair, they bring some evidence that sound like it can be verified and back this opinion up somewhat, but even if it's a correct opinion on this sub-topic, it's still supporting authoritarianism. Anyway, this is where I'm going to stop trying to politically analyze their situation and just not recommend Proton anymore...

It seems they aren't violating the promise about "your data", and are handing over "their data" (IP addresses, payment data)