"Controlled" is a bit hyperbolic, but there's a collaboration agreement between the USA government and the Swiss government, so Proton has to comply with requests from for example the FBI. Quoting a comment by Proton staff on Reddit
> First, let's correct the headline: Proton did not provide information to the FBI. What happened is that the FBI submitted a Mutual Legal Assistance Treaty (MLAT) request, which was processed by the Swiss Federal Department of Justice and Police. Proton operates exclusively under Swiss law, and we only respond to legally binding orders from Swiss authorities, after all Swiss legal checks have been passed. This is an important distinction.
> [...]
> The only information Proton could provide was a payment identifier because the user chose to pay with a credit card. This is information the user themselves provided to us through their choice of payment method. Proton also accepts cryptocurrency and cash payments, which would not have been linkable to an identity.
So basically, don't trust Proton with information unless you want the FBI to know it.
Sorry, perhaps the takeaway is clearer when you see the full quote [0]. I omitted it for space, here's the relevant part
> Third, let's talk about what was actually disclosed. No emails were handed over. No message content. No metadata about who the user communicated with. The only information Proton could provide [...]
Yes, paying by crypto prevents Proton from disclosing your identity that way. Is there anything preventing Proton from disclosing the email content or metadata? Do they claim they won't disclose that? Clearly they do allow themselves to disclose metadata [1]
> For example, in ransomware cases, we can preserve information about which victims contacted the suspect, so that victims can be notified.
So, "just don't pay with a credit card" comes with the additional caveat of "don't email somebody you don't want the FBI to know you emailed". Whether you also need to "don't write anything you don't want the FBI to know", I haven't investigated further, but you could perhaps look that up yourself. I will just assume that to be the case based on what I've seen.
There are limits of what you can encrypt, in all of the cases of proton being critiqued for its compliance with law I haven't seen any instance of them being able to disclose email content, where metadata is "who we're sending email to", which is, I assume, not encryptable if you want an usable service. That being said, the quote does make your pov clearer, thank you for that.
Yeah, if you trust that they will never push a backdoor to your client on the request of Swiss law enforcement. It's a web app "fgs".
They also admit to scanning all mail to and from non-Proton accounts "for spam". So what's stopping them from one day adding a small if statement that just writes that data to disk, for specific "interesting" users?
Regarding metadata, I sure hope you have nothing to hide in the below emphasized:
> Account Activity: Due to limitations of the SMTP protocol, we have access to the following email metadata: *sender and recipient email addresses, the IP address incoming messages originated from, attachment name, message subject, and message sent and received times*. We do NOT have access to encrypted message content, but unencrypted messages sent from external providers to your Account, or from Proton Mail to external unencrypted email services, are scanned for spam and viruses to pursue the legitimate interest of protecting the integrity of our Services and users. Such inbound messages are scanned for spam in memory, and then encrypted and written to disk. We do not possess the technical ability to scan the content of the messages after they have been encrypted. We also have access to the following records of Account activity: number of messages sent, amount of storage space used, total number of messages, last login time. User data is never used for advertising purposes.
Please quote where in that document the answer to my question is:
> Is there anything preventing Proton from disclosing the email content or metadata?
Also please link me to the source code of Proton's server-side code, so I can audit their scanning of all incoming and outgoing mail, to verify it's not logging them. What you linked above is just the clients.
You can get access to it, but it's a quest. You need to buy a volume license, and this requires at least 5 licenses (about $300). Then you'll be eligible to buy an LTSC version.
It doesn't require a corporation or anything, you can do that as a private person. But it IS annoying.
Bottom Line
All LLMs agree: Grokipedia is useful for quick orientation but unreliable for serious research, especially on political, controversial, or current event topics. Wikipedia remains the more trustworthy alternative.
Because of (1) all the people using them uncritically, (2) that they're elite projects in a field whose foudation of "what even are bugs here?" includes amongst its narratives stories of how elites can abuse them for personal gain
It seems that anybody mentioning Telegram is downvoted, but I'm gonna try anyway just to add a simple fact: I just looked up the app in my task manager, while being used, the Telegram app is using 24 mb of ram.
Telegram has its own faults and issues, but the native Windows app is incredibly good and fast.
I would say the opposite. Ente has one huge advantage and that it is e2ee so it's a must if you are hosting someone else photos. But if you are planning to run something on your server/NAS for yourself then Immich has many advantages (that often relate to the e2ee). For example... your files are still files on the disk so less worry about something unrecoverably breaking. And you can add external locations. With Ente it is just about backing up your phone photos. Immich works pretty well as camera photo organizer.
Does it have a mobile app that backs up the photos while in the background and can essentially be "forgotten"? That's pretty much what I need for my family: their photos need to get to my server magically.
I'm also a very happy Ente user. I use Garage for its S3-like storage, with one of the nodes running on my local network (LAN). My local DNS (CoreDNS) is also configured to use this local node for the domain, which makes everything very fast.
Would you mind elaborating, pretty please?
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