

ProtonMail wasn’t able to hand over much information due to its refusal to gather much information about its users. While ProtonMail didn’t cooperate with French authorities, French police sent a request to Swiss police via Europol to force the company to obtain the IP address of one of its users. The company has communicated widely about the incident, stating that it doesn’t log IP addresses by default and it only complies with local regulation - in that case Swiss law. ProtonMail, a hosted email service with a focus on end-to-end encrypted communications, has been facing criticism after a police report showed that French authorities managed to obtain the IP address of a French activist who was using the online service. These inherent weaknesses have been exploited by French law enforcement to obtain information about a French activist - something it achieved with the assistance of Swiss authorities. This is an understandable limitation, which is why many seeking secure communications have moved to encrypted messaging services, rather than email offerings that collect metadata about communications. It also (at least temporarily) retains a certain amount of information about users’ emails - metadata that can be used to verify accounts in the case of a lost password.Īnd while email between ProtonMail accounts is encrypted, the same protection isn’t applied to emails between services, like communications sent to or from ProtonMail from other email services. ProtonMail operates out of Switzerland, making it subject to that country’s laws (which, to be fair, are hardly draconian). The free end-to-end encrypted email service promises more privacy and security than many of its competitors.

ProtonMail has long advertised itself as a particularly privacy-conscious email service.
