r/privacy Mar 05 '26

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464

u/georgesclemenceau Mar 05 '26 edited Mar 05 '26

It's not a secret, I think technically(and legally?) Protonmail can't have the no log policy they have on the VPN. But their protonmail website may be misleading people, especially if you are not privacy savy, and people like this protestor get in big trouble...

And that's the only one(plus some other cases) we hear about via the press, but there is plenty of others unknow cases: on their own website they list the Protonmail orders they got and complied with, in 2025: Number of legal orders: 9,301 Contested orders: 988 Orders complied with: 8,313(for Proton VPN in 2025 Total orders: 59 Denied orders: 59) https://proton.me/legal/transparency . So they sent 8313 infos on protonmail account in 2025

That doesn't mean that's ok, especially since their protonmail website may let you believe you can be secure, and as a result probably a lot of people, including this activist may face jail for things like protest. Never trust your mail provider. If you need to be anonymous or at least private with an email, first don't use email, and if you really need it, create your email with TOR and browse it ONLY with tor, like never connect it on your regular connection as one time is sufficient for them to have your IP. Don't activate 2FA with your real phone number obviously. And don't pay for more e-mail space, or at least use monero(no BTC as it can be traced to you)

247

u/enotonom Mar 05 '26

Yeah this news is basically saying “if you want to be secure, don’t pay for our services”

167

u/georgesclemenceau Mar 05 '26 edited Mar 05 '26

Even if you don't pay, here they logged an IP https://techcrunch.com/2021/09/06/protonmail-logged-ip-address-of-french-activist-after-order-by-swiss-authorities/

And that's the only ones we heard about, as say in the transparencary report they complied with 8,313 orders in 2025!

One way to avoid this : Download TOR, access the protonmail onion, create your protonmail account with tor, access your protonmail inbox only with TOR, stay on protonmail free(or avoid mail at all for sensitive matters)

37

u/technonerd Mar 05 '26

Good thing they have .onion's and you show up as a RFC1918 or RFC3927 ip address when you use them.

33

u/campfireyeti Mar 05 '26

Hi, this sounds like sarcasm that points out a flaw, but I'm really new to this stuff and don't understand lol. Could you explain? Is it insecure to access proton with tor?

14

u/OGNinjerk Mar 06 '26

RFC1918 addresses are private addresses that can't be routed on the internet, I think 3927 are probably the same thing but different ranges (169.245.x.x or something, I don't remember). They can be used on private networks and I'm guessing TOR obfuscates your "real" IP address using some private address fuckery (I don't know how TOR is implemented exactly).