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I understand the points about having to comply with laws. But what is is unjustifiable is my view is that their marketing does not match the reality. They proba
by smnrchrds 5y ago
I understand the points about having to comply with laws. But what is is unjustifiable is my view is that their marketing does not match the reality. They probably did some A/B testing and saw that keeping vague promises about not tracking users increases conversion rate. You, as an HN reader, being in the top 0.1% of the population in terms of tech-savviness, may be able to read through the nonsense and understand how little it means when they say "by default, we do not keep any IP logs". But the other 99.9% of the population won't understand it, and that's why their marketing strategy works: they are selling a level of privacy that does not exist to customers who do not know better without technically lying.
Their threat model and all threat scenarios should be front and centre on their front page and sign up page. That is if they care about user privacy not just the bottom line. They have a choice between better-informed customers or more money, and so far, they have chosen the latter.
What this and the new Apple debacle have proven to me is that privacy is not a product that can be purchased. If you want real privacy, you have spend a lot of time learning how to preserve your privacy. No matter what Apple and ProtonMail and similar companies tell you, you cannot buy privacy off-the-shelf.
- istingray 5y agoI wonder if the future of a company like Protonmail is that it has to be open source. Almost like simply an API, no privacy statement, no marketing, just a smart contract. More like UniSwap.
- ta988 5y agoHow do you do emails on a blockchain? Is that another of those scenarios where "it will work when everybody will switch to the chain" ?
- wallacoloo 5y agoThe naive way would just be to send a transaction to the recipient’s wallet address (or more practically, their ENS name) where the transaction payload is an encrypted text message. As you point out, that requires both parties be on the blockchain. If you want to send/receive off-chain, you would probably just set up a trusted relay. e.g. send an ethereum tx to emailrelay.eth and it would forward it over the SMTP system. Send an email from a SMTP client to recipientaddr.eth@emailrelay.eth.link and it’ll do the reverse. This implementation would have the relay see all your plaintext messages. Not much different from how centralized email services like gmail operate, in practice. There’s nothing that makes any of this technically infeasible to a knowledgeable dev today — maybe it even already exists (ethmail.cc shows there’s at least interest in it). Transaction fees kill this from a practicality point of view. Probably you want to roll this out on a layer 2 network, and those are still pretty new things.
- istingray 5y agoOh neat wasn't aware of ethmail.cc will check it out
- plafl 5y ago> Transaction fees kill this from a practicality point That depends on the amount. If it's small it could be a feature.
- randomswede 5y agoSubmit encrypted message to sufficiently large and stable data processor (bitcoin blockchain, hackernews, reddit, ...). Provide pointer to message via side channel to recipient. Done. Now, that has OTHEHR problems. So, as anything but a napkin sketch, don't take it too seriously.
- atoav 5y agoWho pays the servers then?
- istingray 5y agoThe users. Who else?
- aembleton 5y agoAn intelligence agency such as the CIA
- atoav 5y agoOkay so whom are they paying?
- istingray 5y agoIn the decentralized scenario, the users are paying the underlying system as well as the particular itself. Check out Uniswap as an example. Users pay ether to run a process, and pay Uniswap a fee for the protocol.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- fsckboy 5y agoYou may not have given it much thought before, but the idea (in your head, let's say) that Protonmail keeps no logs and thus completely protects you from ip-address discovery by law enforcement would imply that one could freely solicit and exchange unencrypted child pornography with strangers with no fear of detection. I'm not saying "think of the children", I'm saying "think of law enforcement and the judicial system" thinking about it now in retrospect, do you think that really could have been a possibility? I don't.
- 0-_-0 5y agoAs far as I can tell, that actually is possible between Protonmail users
- legrande 5y agoPM addresses to PM addresses are encrypted. All it takes is a mistakenly made carbon-copy / blind-carbon-copy to a Gmail account and all that encryption goes out the window
- wellthisishn 5y agoThis seems like a scapegoat argument
- function_seven 5y agoI don't read it that way. More like, "keep this extreme example in mind, and see if you still expect the guarantees to hold up". If you don't, then they won't either for whatever activities you're doing, that aren't as reprehensible as CSAM, but some government may think otherwise. It's kind of depressing reasoning maybe. But if a privacy-preserving system is actually that, then even the most technically-savvy terrorists and child abusers should have no qualms about using it as well.
- fsckboy 5y agoon the wall at your dry cleaner is a sign, "we are not responsible if your clothing gets ruined" and there's a sign at the parking garage, "we are not responsible if your car gets damaged". But, you have the right to expect that the dry cleaner and parking garage will take reasonable care with your belongings and will not act in ways that are negligent, the signs they put up notwithstanding. There's no scapegoating, it's a question of what should a reasonable person expect from a transaction. Protonmail said they don't keep logs by default and that they also need to respect court orders.
- simonh 5y agoYou can't buy immunity from the legal and law enforcement system, full stop. That's simply an unreasonable expectation. What you can buy is various degrees and quality of sensible defaults and behaviours that serve your general interest in privacy and security. Privacy from casual snooping or commercial tracking, security from unsophisticated attacks or even sophisticated attacks if you're wiling to also sacrifice some convenience. These are all worth having, and your choices of product and service provider can have a significant impact on them. I know little to nothing about ProtonMail but maybe they're a better bet than many other similar services, even if they're not perfect.
- thpint 5y agoBy default they don’t have logging on. Does not mean they can’t turn it on if asked. You can’t have privacy; you need to be actively participating in our society or you’re dead. As soon as you try to build it you’ll realize it’s a full time job and you won’t be able to afford to eat on what it pays. Only 5% of people in the US still hunt. We are coupled to the modern systems we have (unless MIT is right and it falls apart soon). You want privacy, go off grid. Those of us living on grid will be sure to leave you be and keep everything we build for ourselves. None of us explicitly cheered on the end of privacy but we did cheer on the engineering effort that made it happen. Despite numerous voices warning us. Ciao.
- ithkuil 5y agoYeah, this debacle will probably help them find a better wording of their guarantees. They do explain the threat model quite well but the information is scattered around (e.g. https://protonmail.com/blog/protonmail-threat-model/ https://protonmail.com/blog/protonmail-threat-model/) and this matters in an era where the attention span of people is very short.
- motohagiography 5y agoThat threat model post is really good. I have a pet saw that is: for security companies, the threat model is the product. There might be a few things I would add to that post, but really, it's a very sound approach.
- o8r3oFTZPE 5y ago"No matter what Apple and ProtoMail and similar companies tell you, you cannot buy privacy off-the-shelf." The cost is personal time and effort, not money. The software needed is generally free of charge. The goal being not a physical product or a service, but a level of knowledge and proficiency. To put it another way, "tech-savviness" cannot be purchased, it has to be achieved. The cultural problem we face is that the so-called "0.1%" are leveraging their "tech-savviness" against the rest of the population, working for so-called "tech" companies, websites that make money by exploiting the privacy of the "99.9%" in the service of online advertising. If we take HN comments as true, in some cases, these employees do not even believe in the bottom line they are working to support.1 They are not adopting the behaviour of the "99.9%", i.e., the "expected" behaviour required to sustain their employer's bottom line. Not sure about you, but that would not give me much confidence they are going to work very hard to protect other users' privacy. The term "dogfooding" is sometimes used amongst tech companies to describe the situation where employees themselves partake in what they offer to non-employees, i.e., "users".2 To persons outside the tech bubble this can be quite amusing. Does this suggest they view their relationship to users as more like "human-to-dog" than "human-to-human". There is nothing inherently wrong with someone peddling something she does not believe in, however we might consider what is/are the reason(s) for her lack of faith. To be clear, I am not suggesting the cultural problem can be solved. I am attempting to provide further reasons that digital privacy is, like the parent suggested, generally not something you can "buy". 1 Evidence appears periodically in HN comments. For example, yesterday: "Disclaimer: I work at Google. In cloud, not on Android. I am privacy conscious so I though I would give a try at Graphene OS, it was brutal." 2 The term is alleged to have first appeared one the joelonsoftware.com website and to have originated at Microsoft.
- techdragon 5y ago"Dogfooding" is the tech industry variant of a much older principle. The original expression "Eating your own dogfood" goes back further having been adopted, and shortened into "dogfooding". While its easy to see it implying a second class "dogfood" that the end users have to put up with, it actually stems from the opposite, that the product is good enough they feed it to their own dogs, or in one telling, willingly eat it themselves as a human. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eating_your_own_dog_food https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eating_your_own_dog_food
- int_19h 5y ago> No matter what Apple and ProtonMail and similar companies tell you, you cannot buy privacy off-the-shelf. You can. It's just not that cheap, and not quite as convenient. https://thehelm.com/ https://thehelm.com/
- istingray 5y agoOh neat, I haven't seen this before. Can you explain more for the rest of us? I saw it can be a personal email server - but then it started talking about storing everything for me and I lost a bit of interest as that sounds like it's trying to do everything. edit: for those curious, discussion on HN 3 years ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18238581 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18238581
- lelandfe 5y agoThought ArsTechnica's review from 2018 was pretty good: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/12/review-helm-personal-server-gets-email-self-hosting-almost-exactly-right/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/12/review-helm-personal...
- int_19h 5y agoThere was another discussion more recently: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28350466 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28350466