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India may block Proton Mail (techcrunch.com)

submitted 9 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (3 children)

What a stupid thing to say.

Whatever your favorite (and probably shitty) proprietary or open source messaging service - not everybody uses it. But hey, everyone has email, so let's kill that.

BTW since you said encryption is important to you: your walled-garden messaging service has a much easier time profiling you and your friends than they would in a heterogenous environment like email. They don't need the content anyway, just metadata.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

They don't need the content anyway, just metadata.

ProtonMail uses PGP encryption to encrypt emails, which means your meta data, including subject line is vulnerable to data collection. Also there is no forward secrecy with current PGP standard. See quotes from below:

We have built Proton Mail with PGP fully integrated, ... All messages between Proton Mail users are automatically end-to-end encrypted.

https://proton.me/support/how-to-use-pgp

Subject lines and recipient/sender email addresses are encrypted but not end-to-end encrypted.

https://proton.me/support/proton-mail-encryption-explained

PGP (especially for email) exposes much more info to outside party than any good communication protocol, like the signal protocol or OMEMO used by XMPP.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Oh no, profiling. Google can read your emails directly

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago (1 children)

No, they can't since I don't have a Google mail address. Even if I had, they'd have a harder time building a social graph when I communicate with others outside of Gmail.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago

Okay, but unless all of your communication is e2e encrypted, your provider can read all of your messages. They can even show you ads based on the contents. Oh, you bought vitamins on Amazon? How about some minerals?

If I send messages with matrix, the matrix server admin cannot read them. If I cared about them seeing who I'm talking to, I would run my own server

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago

IDK, I think that's kind of flawed logic. E.g. "we should stop using gasoline for cars and switch to electric" - would you say "what a stupid thing to say. everyone uses gas so we shouldn't try to stop"?

And are you not aware of Signal? It's open source, and the default server is not, but it doesn't matter since it is E2E encrypted, just like Proton. The difference is that ProtonMail allows you to communicate unencrypted with non-ProtonMail accounts.

I think all they're saying is that, similar to gas users, there are many people who will not stop using it or just don't care unless we sunset gas cars / email for them.

I do agree with that, and in both cases it isn't something which can happen overnight, but it is a serious long term problem which IMO we should be pushing to solve.