This is exactly what bugs me about that news.
1. I pay for Proton with a credit card or another fiat payment provider => they know, which email address belongs to me.
2. I create a wallet with that account. It takes a lot of trust to believe, Proton (and thus also each country requesting information) doesn't know the wallet's address.
They could now connect my identity from the payment to the wallet I created.
I know, email content is encrypted and also the seed phrase is only known to me. But in the past, Proton had to hand out meta information like email address, recipient, time and date etc. to law enforcement.
Now add to that, that the EU is planing to implement a central asset register for every citizen. Switzerland too, by the way.
Or am I missing something here?
In any case, the “advantage” of sending Bitcoin via email to another Proton user is not enough for me to take this risk.
I would somehow prefer a completely anonymous model, like Mullvad, where you can also pay in cash in an envelope or crypto. Or better a wallet that cannot be connected to anything else.
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I have also always questioned their product development policy. When it was just an email service, ok ... good. Then the calendar came out. Also good. But the calendar had no WebDav capability and you couldn't import your existing Google calendar either. Finally made the whole Proton calendar unusable.
And their Drive could not be attached as a local drive for a long time. I don't know, have these two weaknesses been fixed in the meantime? They've always made the excuse that the security requirements would make such features more difficult. I haven't been a customer there for a long time and hardly use their email anymore.
Then I heard they were moving towards a (Google) Office replacement. Also good. But what's with this sudden switch to a Bitcoin wallet? What does this have to do with a Google Office replacement and who asked for it anyway?
As I said, the product development policy is strange to the point of being suspicious.
I wasn't aware that Proton had to hand over meta data in the past.
That's good to know.
Every provider has to without any exception. No company would risk being shut down for your privacy. Only those, who don't know their customer at all (like Mullvad) can't even hand out that data.
Don't forget Israeli Cloudinary loading assets on their web apps
Yes, it’s about getting normies to dox themselves, by associating peoples email address with their #bitcoin transactions, a latent data honey pot 🍯