Proton Mail discloses activist IP address to police

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ProtonMail provides the IP address of a climate activist to police

In early September 2021, Swiss authorities obtained a court order that resulted in Proton logging the IP address and device information for a particular Proton Mail account. That connection data was provided to investigators and was reported to have contributed to identification in the related investigation and an arrest involving an activist associated with protests in France.

Proton's response

"This case shows that Proton Mail works as it is designed to. The identity and location of the activist was already known to the French authorities (they had already been evicted once before for squatting, and the nature of squatting means that their location is known). Therefore, the authorities were most likely targeting email contents which might have provided further incriminating evidence. The fact that Proton Mail was not able to hand over any messages even under legal order proves that our encryption works, and very likely will be of great assistance to the activist in this case. Had they been using any other email provider, the outcome would have been very different"

"In October 2021, Proton won a Swiss court ruling that email services are not telecommunications providers. Consequently, email services are not subject to the data retention requirements imposed on telecommunications providers and are exempted from handing over certain user data in response to Swiss legal orders"

"We will be making updates to our website to better clarify Proton Mail’s obligations in cases of criminal prosecution and we apologize if this was not clear. As a Swiss company, we must follow Swiss laws. We will also clarify that the use of our onion site (details below) is highly recommended for users with heightened privacy needs. Finally, we will also be updating our privacy policy to make clearer our legal obligations under Swiss law. "

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