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news media claims Proton mail helped FBI unmask anonymous stop cop city protestors:
(www.404media.co)
this post was submitted on 06 Mar 2026
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Proton didn't "help the FBI". Proton was forced to help the Swiss government. By law, Proton has to refuse to help the FBI, because that would break Swiss privacy laws. But if the FBI convinces the Swiss government to help them, then the Swiss can just kick in Proton's doors and seize all their servers if Proton refuses a legal warrant.
Proton is privacy focused email, it is not anonymous email unless you use Tor and pay with Bitcoin.
Since they "helped" the Swiss court by following necessary Swiss law, didn't they "help" the FBI?
If they didn't even know the FBI was asking the Swiss courts, one could still say they were "helped" to the FBI. What they did was "helpful" to the FBI.
don't be pedantic. you know exactly what I meant when I said they didn't help the FBI.
No. That's the point. We have different ideas about what it means to help. I think help is simply doing something (or not doing something) that benefits someone else. You (and others) seem to also give it some additional qualities related to consent, agrement, or support. Since I don't ascribe any moral judgement to the word and only use its most limited literal meaning, I hope it's more clear to you how confusing ican be when you infer morality from amoral terms.
You're being very pedantic for nothing.
Yes. It would save a lot of confusion online if people were more pedantic. One might even call it helping.
No. You're creating debates and arguments over insignificant shit.
The two aren't mutually exclusive.
Proton chooses to retain data associating accounts with personal information from credit card payments, and they choose to advertise Swiss legal jurisdiction as a privacy feature.
if you stick a privacy fence up around your house, does it make you anonymous? of course not, because privacy does not mean anonymous. you should not blame someone else because you are confused on the difference between privacy and anonymity.
given that Swiss law means complying with MLAT requests from many countries including the US, why do you think Proton chooses to retain data linking user accounts with payment identities?
i am not confused at all about "the difference between privacy and anonymity"; the former is a broader concept which includes the latter. Privacy regarding one's identity (or avoiding revealing the link between related identities, which is what is usually meant by "anonymity") is one of many types of privacy.
Proton mail advertises "privacy", not "privacy except not with regards to your legal identity which we needlessly retain information about and which you should obviously expect us to give to the authorities upon request".
where did you get the notion that "privacy" excludes "anonymity"? this is not a rhetorical question, i am interested to know because I see these "difference between privacy and anonymity" comments frequently lately and i wonder where this meme originated.
fraud prevention and account security, which they specify on their website. especially if you opt into their increased security protocols, your payment information can used to validate your identity to protect your account from being stolen.
the dictionary. proton does not advertise themselves as anonymous email. since the two words have wholly different meanings, where did you get the notion that someone advertising apples was selling oranges? idk if you're trying to be argumentative for the sake of it, but your position is ridiculous because anonymity was never advertised, and you're trying to infer it is to justify your position that proton has done something wrong. you've already reached your conclusion and are trying to twist the literal meaning of words to justify your biases.
So, i just checked, and they actually do (albeit with caveats, including not using your name when signing up, but no mention of when paying) here and here among other places.
I see also that those pages are promulgating exactly the "anonymity vs. privacy" false dichotomy that you are. Proton writes (emphasis mine):
Their very narrowly-scoped definition of the word privacy is inconsistent with how most of the world uses the word. Proton is defining email privacy to mean solely the confidentiality of the body of the message (which they also provide a trivial-for-them-to-circumvent protection of, incidentally) but the word "privacy" elsewhere (eg, in law, technology, academia, and colloquially) has a much broader meaning.
Or, to put it more simply: Category:Anonymity is (literally) a subcategory of Category:Privacy.
Proton isn't even consistent in their own usage of their absurdly-narrow definition of privacy: in their How to send an anonymous email guide they write:
Do you think by "privacy" and "sensitive user data" they're only talking about the body of email messages here, as per their earlier definition?
And, regardless of whether or not a company advertises its services for anonymity (as Proton does): after clicking the above links and thinking about it a little more, do you still think that retaining and revealing links between users' pseudonyms and legal identities is really not a privacy issue?
Bitcoin is not anonymous
not if you're an average internet user who thinks bitcoin can't be anonymous, no.