> Protonmail did not provide the authorities with the users IP address...they did allow the account to monitored which they are required by their laws to allow.
Something their marketing material appears to disclaim. This is just excuse-making. ProtonMail did what ProtonMail has (for years!) led their customers to believe they would not do. And they did.
I think there's an argument to be made that any commercial email/messaging provider simply can't do what ProtonMail claimed to do. But that doesn't change the fact that ProtonMail did it.
> ProtonMail did what ProtonMail has (for years!) led their customers to believe they would not do.
My rule is to give any corporate statement about what they "will not do" exactly zero credence.
The only thing worth anything in that context is open source where independent programmers can verify that the code cannot support undesirable behaviors. And even then you're not safe, because code running on someone else's machine might actually be anything. So in the end, self-hosted open source software is the only way.
Right now that requires some degree of technical know-how, but I believe that's a solvable problem the same way operating systems have turned the technical practice of process management into something users don't even need to think about.
Something their marketing material appears to disclaim. This is just excuse-making. ProtonMail did what ProtonMail has (for years!) led their customers to believe they would not do. And they did.
I think there's an argument to be made that any commercial email/messaging provider simply can't do what ProtonMail claimed to do. But that doesn't change the fact that ProtonMail did it.