this post was submitted on 05 Sep 2021
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Privacy
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"Private" and "Anonymous" are different things.
You can protect privacy with encryption, and I believe ProtonMail does work for that, but trying to protect anonymity is an entirely different beast. I'm not convienced it's possible at all in any way that's reliable (not just email but also even simple web browsing) unless there's a change in how routing works in the internet, or a new layer is developed (like I2P, but even that's not really a warranty).
True. Someone can have high standard for privacy and at the same time have no desire for anonymity. The thing is that what was compromised in this case is the identity of the person who owns the email. The emails themselves were kept private.
What the email provider snitched is the IP address (which wasn't "tori-fied"). So it was anonymity what was compromised in this case.
The email was openly used for activism so the police was already investigating it, they only wanted to know the identity of the physical person behind it, and that's what ProtonMail helped with, since the activist didn't use anonymizers. The police didn't need to decrypt the contents of the account or compromise its privacy (which is what using ProtonMail would have protected against), just its anonymity.