this post was submitted on 03 Nov 2025
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Privacy
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Lumo by Proton is private and free, however, it's not very good (at least on free tier).
Duck.ai claims to be private, but you can never trust an American company on that.
You should not trust any company with your privacy regardless of where they're located. Proton is logging what you're doing just as much as anyone else.
Nope, that’s why independent audits exist. On a random day, technicians from other organizations show up and check how the data is being handled, and Proton has passed every audit.
The reason you can’t trust American companies on that is because of the Electronic Communications Privacy Act and the National Security Letter. Government agencies can force companies to hand over data or create backdoors without court orders, and the companies aren’t allowed to tell their clients about it.
The audits mean nothing when the Swiss government can compel Proton to do whatever they want, as they've done before.
The only difference between what you're describing and what Proton did is that Proton were obligated to notify the user.
"Swiss law prohibits the country’s courts from compelling a VPN service to log IP addresses"
Seems like they breached only IPs that accessed emails (I haven't read their email terms before, but the VPN says "strict no-logs policy" - which is audited), but because of the zero-knowledge encryption they can't access email content.
ps: Another difference is that the government had to demonstrate on court there were basis to believe certain emails were linked to criminal activity... not that I don't believe it's bullshit, but in the USA they can require any data for any reason without demonstrating probable cause and you can't even mention it's happening.