"We would be less confidential than Google" Proton threatens to quit Switzerland

The law can't bind future lawmakers. That's a common feature of every legal system.

Any legal system can pass a law saying "we revoke this previous law".

every law is temporal, until it gets re-written or killed outright

Think of the children

Using percentages is illegitimate. It's frog boiling.

Governments lean on large providers like Microsoft to not implement strong technological privacy protections because they want to invade everyone's privacy, and those companies go along because they want to get government contracts or curry favor with government regulators, or because they want to invade your privacy themselves.

Then anyone privacy-conscious abandons them before any abuses are revealed because they've seen this movie before and know what's coming next. But that includes criminal organizations, so now for a transient period of time the competing services that still protect privacy have a disproportionate number of criminals. This is then used as an excuse to shut them down or force them to stop protecting anyone's privacy.

That's when the real abuses start, because the privacy-protecting services have been suppressed as "only used by criminals" and once the general public has lost the ability to switch, there is no longer competitive pressure on the incumbents to not betray their now-captive user base.

You can try to prevent this by getting people to switch to the privacy-protecting services ahead of time, but that doesn't mean it's reasonable to accept the consent-manufacturing tactic as legitimate either.

> in current situation where more than 1 200 000 accounts there are

Both evidence and a basis for comparison (total number of accounts) are necessary before this claim is worth considering.

yet it has nothing to do with Proton and everything to do with encryption and the reason why you hear the name Proton is because they open their mouth

Maintaining democracy during peace time is easy. During war time it’s hard.

It’s also exactly the time where we should do work our hardest to maintain democracy.

I would recommend reading the Lincoln letter to William H. Herndon dated Feb. 15. 1848

The contents of the emails are encrypted so you have a normal login plus a key to unencrypt your email locally. They save your encrypted email conyents and your login but not the key and they also don't log your access (I'm assuming here from reading the article).

To me the value prospect of Proton falls down even before that - how can e-mail ever be a secure medium of communication if only one side of the conversation is secure, given how ubiquitous Google and Outlook are in the space?

> Sweden, having their legacy in social democracy and more state control, hates privacy

Generally, this is because Swedes trust the state.

What does social democracy have to do with hating privacy?

The UK, US, Australia, and other capitalist flagships are all trying to do the same. Not to mention the Patriot Act.

The issue is that countries may not care. The Danish government famously refuses to comply with EU verdicts that makes logging all phone calls and spying on text messages illegal. The Danish supreme court and the European Court of Human Rights have agreed with the government that "it's fine" in a "please think of the children"-moment.

only musk can save datacenters from reaches of earths governments.

by transporting every cargo to USA for thorough inspection before flight.

As a Norwegian I would not feel safe hosting such here.

Of the ~10 parties with a chance of a seat at the parlament, absolutely none have any clue what so ever when it comes to IT security matters.

The major parties have multiple times attemted to push egregious laws like collecting all internet metadata in our country, and storing it for years. They argued it wouldn't be a risk because only authorized personel would have access...

Sheer luck has twarted those attempts.

If someone knows a Norwegian datacentre offering colocation, that has no connection to USA, please let me know.

But is an absolute monarchy (e.g. non-independent judiciary).

And their military defense is outsourced to Switzerland.

Proton isn’t giving up VPN users. It’s giving up mail users. There’s a huge legal difference.

It’s still somewhat of a current topic though.

https://www.wsj.com/finance/banking/nazi-ties-to-credit-suis...

Private banks are very different from consumer banks in Switzerland. You might as well consider them as different kinds of things.

> A better question is how many banks does Switzerland still have?

Something like 9% of Swiss GDP comes from banking and insurance.

Bringing up Nazis, terrorists, and “the children” is always relevant to privacy detractors who think it’s suspicious for regular people to not want to be spied on.

Because governments aren't persecuting people in the middle of the spectrum.

Why do you say so? Genuinely asking.

I'm not into Proton, as their offer is both too costly for me and overkill for my needs. Still, in which way do you think they're scamming people?

> Their CEO seems to like trump

As far as I know this is a "rumour" that stems from him mentioning his approval over one of Trump's cabinet pick. Saying he likes Trump is a stretch.

Someone dug deeper into this topic: https://medium.com/@ovenplayer/does-proton-really-support-tr...

TL;DR: probably not a Trump supporter

Not to be pedantic, but Donald Trump received around 77 million votes in the 2024 presidential election, which would be around 23% of the then population, I think.

That can't be answered in general, it depends on whom you're talking about. Adolf Hitler had a great election result in November 1933 and Vladimir Putin also appears to be popular. That being said, in this case we're talking about someone from Switzerland supporting a US politicians, which seems to be bizarre, though that depends on the meaning of "support" in the context.