ProtonMail Continues To Be The Safest, Most Secure, and Private Email Provider

Last evening I saw this article link from Steiger Legal, on a blog run by Swiss lawyer Martin Steiger, in which he published a damning allegation that my beloved ProtonMail, the end-to-end encrypted email provider, was:

Email service provider ProtonMail, based in Switzerland, offers assistance for real-time surveillance: Voluntarily!

Steiger goes on with writing a factually incorrect article about ProtonMail on his blog, alleging, among other things, that “ProtonMail voluntarily offers assistance for real-time surveillance.”

Fortunately ProtonMail responded with, in part, this clear statement:

So that there can be no ambiguity: ProtonMail does not voluntarily offer assistance as alleged. We only do so when ordered by a Swiss court or prosecutor, as we are obligated to follow the law in all criminal cases. Furthermore, ProtonMail’s end-to-end encryption means we cannot be forced by a court to provide unencrypted message contents.

That’s crystal clear in my view. Just to restate that last sentence, even if a prosecutor was able to scrape metadata about which user emailed to another person(s), the contents of the email could not be decrypted by ProtonMail and provided (and a government or intelligence service could not as well without massive computing power and a lot of time!

Unfortunately I had seen this article but not ProtonMail’s rebuttal before emailing their support and tweeting it to @ProtonMail, they responded to my tweet:

Hi Steve, these allegations are false, and have also been refuted by the Swiss public prosecutor earlier this week. We have responded on our blog here with more details: https://t.co/xdz2xfF4pu

— ProtonMail (@ProtonMail) May 31, 2019

I then responded and apologized for being rash and not investigating fully before tweeting:

Thank you for the clarification! Had not yet read the HN thread nor your post. Should have gone there first … apologies for that.

Note: With all the recent breaches and revelations that mobile apps are “phoning home” with metadata, my paranoia is accelerating. https://t.co/7XAkEEKD8B

— Steve Borsch (@sborsch) May 31, 2019

The “recent breaches” and “phoning home” items I referred to in my reply to ProtonMail were:

• Brian Krebs’ scoop that First American Title company exposed 885 million Americans home purchase documents (Note: They were my title company when we bought and closed on a new house out here in California only six months ago).

• Washington Post article about how their privacy experiment showed 5,400 hidden app trackers guzzled our data — in a single week on the reporter’s iPhone.

Is it no wonder I rushed-to-judgement for a secure email service I rely upon to keep my emails to family and friends — and the PDFs, Word docs, and Excel spreadsheets with vital data in them — secure from prying eyes?

Thank you, ProtonMail team, for helping to keep us safe and secure!