This is a silly thing to take issue with. I use a password manager. When I need a new password I allow the manager to generate one for me. Is the password inherently insecure or bad because it was generated by “a company” and not myself? Proton generates your key for you, just like a password manager does, and they’ve integrated that functionality into their service for ease of use, and probably ease of administration as well. There is no way someone can screw it up and not be able to read their emails if Proton handles it.
Encrypting email is extremely niche in the first place, the fact that Proton can enable it quickly and seamlessly for users with no prior knowledge on how this all works is a good thing imo. Everyone with just enough knowledge to think they know better seems to get annoyed by this type of thing and starts spreading ridiculous FUD even while Proton is enabling encrypted email for millions of people who otherwise would be using Google Mail. Don’t get so caught up in the details that you miss the big picture of what Proton is actually providing.
Right, but what the author is trying to implement is what is generally considered best practice for secure email.
You’re right that what Proton are doing is a compromise that’s reasonable for most people, but the author here is annoyed that there’s no way to turn it off so he can implement best practice E2EE himself.
Ironically he could probably do that with the vast majority of providers that aren’t Proton, so to me it seems like a totally reasonable ask that a self described privacy focused email provider has some way to allow you to implement best practice email security.
Exactly this. Why in the world would they not allow that? I don’t believe it’s that hard.
I guess they were probably so caught up in making it easy to use they forgot about the best practice use case.
I agree with you - I don’t think it would take much to adapt their system to support both, even if it’s a manual “I know what I’m doing” power user option hidden away somewhere.
I’m on the fence about this since how would proton verify that “best practices” were followed? They are a privacy focused product and a feature like that could be used to decrease their services privacy. This author would likely implement best practices and many other likely would too, but say a competitor wanted to prove that their product was more secure, a feature like that could enable a competitor to showcase a security “flaw”. And since headlines are all people read these days it would be damaging.
The feature the author described would be great but ProtonMail would need to make it fool-proof and temper-proof which requires a lot of Dev time and effort. I’m still waiting on proton bridge to work with calendar and contacts. Or contacts birthdays to show up in my calendar.
Like I said, its a good feature, but its likely a large ask for a niche group of customers.
Eh, I don’t think it’s be a big deal. Slap a giant warning on it, all good. Super common on all sorts of platforms. Anyone trying to claim their encryption doesn’t work because they have a (scarily labelled) option to disable it can be easily demonstrated to be disingenuous.
And worst case if someone does disable it but doesn’t implement their own then their email I just falls back to… the same as any other platform.
They might not want to take the time to build it, but I think what this dude is asking for is a totally reasonable thing.
If someone else makes the key to your house, they can make themselves a copy of the key to your house without you noticing.
Do you make your own house keys?
I buy them from the company which makes the lock. If I need an extra key, I make it myself with the machine at my makerspace. People who give their keys away to keymakers and give them their addresses obviously have bad opsec.
I have in the past yes.
No… It’s generated on your end, and even if it wasn’t you can replace the private key with your own.
This is dumb. Proton encrypts your private keys with your password.
Just upload the key to your encrypted proton account like you’re supposed to, and let them take care of the signing/encryption/etc.
Can you eli5 this please?
Proton offers a service where they hide all your messages for you, but in a way they can’t even see. This person is complaining that they can’t hide their messages from proton in a different way that they’re likely to screw up.
Based on the title i was expecting some kind of AI that rewrites your email to make it better or something. But no just encryption drama. :(.
Someday i will be able to send emails and not have people think i am an illiterate moron but not today.
Someday i will be able to send emails and not have people think i am an illiterate moron but not today.
You know you can copy and paste your emails into ChatGPT right?
Isn’t everything entered into ChatGPT used to further train it?
Yeah I have done that a few times but your assuming I am not a lazy person it is just not worth the extra steps. Not to mention privacy wise that isn’t a very good idea. Especially if the email contains some confidential/sensitive information.
I was thinking it would be cool to have a native one button fix my grammar. Or maybe a spell check like interface that I can just select text and pick alternative phrases.
There would still be privacy issues that may not be acceptable for a privacy based company like Proton Mail but it could be something like this AI will never remember or save the data it is analysing.
it could be something like this AI will never remember or save the data it is analysing.
How would you know? In fact, how do you know Proton Mail is not a front shop for the NSA exfiltrating all.your data?
That is a good point. I can’t think of a way to know for sure. Without running the software locally.
Not to mention privacy wise that isn’t a very good idea.
“ChatGPT, please write me an email to send to my girlfriend to convince her I’m not cheating on her with her second boyfriend. Please include details <herein enclosed> of my recent Isis involvement so she knows it’s really me. This is a pretty common request so you can use the template to help out other users.”
Is it me or a lot of the responses here a little bot like. Looks like anorchestrated discreditation campaign.
What percentage of users actually need GPG encryption? If they really need it, they can find services to do it on.
Everybody I know who is into using GPG, wants to be 100% in control of their keys.
I’m sure they do, but this feels like 1% of 1% of users. To trash an email client that will be vastly superior to most for a ridiculously niche case even amongst nerds is a bit weird.
You can be if you encrypt manually. It’s easy and works everywhere.
That seems… Not great.
Yup, this is the worst thing about ProtonMail. They must patch this. Not being able to use my own GPG encryption when needed is crazy for a private & secure service.
That’s not true at all, you just upload your key into the encrypted account storage, and it gets automatically applied.
I don’t want to upload anything. Why would they ever not allow that?
The point being made is that that means you must trust them with your private key, and you can’t have say two private keys - one for low security content they store, and one for more sensitive stuff where the key stays on hardware under your control.
You are literally trusting them to encrypt all your mail.
If you don’t trust their encryption, respectfully, don’t use them. It’s faux logic to “need” a secondary key that isn’t cloud synced in an end to end encrypted mail vault.
This is an unnecessary product complication, and I agree with proton that you’re more than likely to get it wrong and your “more secure” key will be used in a less secure manor.
It’s the same reason most people shouldn’t self host things like Bitwarden. Doing it yourself is not a security feature anymore than wiring your own home is protecting it.
This privacy community and the conspiracies or flat out misunderstandings that are coming back from the Reddit grave feel like they are coming from the anonymouse joker and Rob Braxman.
Why is that a fault in logic? The features are orthogonal. One doesn’t restrict the other. All other, normal, email providers allow client side gpg use.
What is the benefit to using your own key on top of protons encryption? Why not just use your own encryption with any other provider?
One less email to have? Wdym???
Put another way…
You went to a custom shoe maker and said “make me a custom shoe” then you went back to them and said “I wanted to do it myself! Why won’t you let me change out the insoles in these shoes!”
Yes, what’s the problem with that? Services should provide as much flexibility as possible.
That mentality is part of the problem. More options is not inherently better, it’s more to maintain, more complexity, more feature requests in that direction (“well can I store a PGP key in the browser that isn’t uploaded to your servers so I can read my non-synced PGP mail”, “can I write mail using that”, “oh I changed my mind, can I convert mail to your PGP key from my PGP key”, “oh I changed my mind again, I’d actually like all my emails changed to my PGP key”, “oh could you sync my PGP key for me”, etc).
It happens all the time, bending over backwards as a company for niche customers that want to use your toaster as a waffle iron rarely works out well.
Between this and the IP logging scandal, it seems that they’re going downhill fast.
It was hardly a scandal. They complied with their local laws, as would be expected. They’re very well-known to be a swiss company. Complying with swiss law shouldn’t be a surprise.
A more fair criticism would be that, after this event they changed the precise wording in their marketing (and maybe tos?) to more accurately reflect what they could offer.
The scandal didn’t lie in following court orders, it lied in the marketing and the fact that the French ToS lacked any nuance to indicate that it would even be a possibility that ip would be logged.
Furthermore, even when dealt with court orders, other companies that don’t tout privacy to be one of their core values, have chosen to fight such orders in court.
Proton could’ve at least tried to show that they were putting their money where their mouth is, by challenging the order.They told the guy they were going to start logging his activities and he kept going anyway. It’s not Proton’s job to get shut down or fight an endless slew of legal battles.
If a government is coming after you, Proton isn’t the solution to your privacy needs. Know your threat model and ignore FUD.
You mean following a legal order that any company would have to do?
I still haven’t signed up for ProtonMail. Doesn’t sound like a good idea with this going on!
