• Proton VPN has hit back at Canada’s proposed Bill C-22
• The proposed legislation could require VPNs to log user metadata
• NordVPN and Windscribe have also slammed the bill
Why is our liberal government a fuckass conservative government?
Neoliberals want that the entity controlled by voters - the elected government/president/whatever (depending on country) - to not watch over or control the things which are important for Money (in their parlance, to “not interfere with the Free Market”, which in turn justifies privatising everything).
In other words, to make the Power which is controlled by voters be below the Power Of Money.
They’re against Democracy and in favor of Oligarch with “democracy” as a theatrical façade focused only on Moral subjects and not doing anything at all for other things which constrain the Freedom of most people.
Notice how the more hard-core Neoliberal the mainstream “center”-“left” parties in a country are (and the one Canada is pretty hard-core compared to most of Europe, tough even then not quite at the level of the Democrats in the US) the more their entire public political fight with the (Fascist) “center”-right is in the Moral space (Identity Politics) and the less it is in terms of freedoms which are limited by the control of Money over everything required for survival (with productive and shelter assets being owned mainly by a handful of people, so the rest are forced to toil within conditions controled the former group merely to have food and shelter).
In summary, they shrink “Democracy” down to a system that represents voters in the Moral sphere only where they loudly “battle” the “right” and everything else important to voters is controller not by a system where every person has one and only one vote and all votes count the same, but by a system where each dollar is a “vote” and some people have billions more “votes” than others - in other words, it’s not Democracy anymore because in most domains the vote which is equal for all individuals controls nothing at all.
I’m not fully familiar with the politics in Canada (though what I’ve seen of the Liberals is basically what I describe above), but all of this shit is painfully obvious in both the US and Britain, plus it has already infiltrated the rest of Europe to quite an extent (especially the EU, since Neoliberlas use it’s supranational powers which are supposedly to facilitate Trade Integration, to force Neoliberal policies on countries, especially those in the Eurozone).
Anyways, all this to say that the increasing Authoritarianism you see in the more Neoliberal countries is the mainstream “center” parties which control power making sure they can detect and subvert early any civil society movements which might wrestly power away from them - in other words, the final destruction of whatever is left of Democracy and the path which is still left through the vote to undo the Oligarchic system (which would require the mainstream parties to lose most of their vote to alternatives naturally born from the civil society which weren’t just puppets created by wealthy individuals, something which already is very difficult in countries with First Past The Post systems and which total civil society surveilance is meant to make impossible)
Both sides are equally authoritarian once in control.
That is not today’s problem. The Brian Mulroney conservatives don’t have a home in the party of extemeists that is lead by pp, or Erin O’Toole, or Andrew Scheer. Now the Liberals are right of center and lean strongly into neo-lib ideology. Justin Trudeau was a neo-lib hiding under the veneer of decent social policy. Jagmeet Singh was also a neo-lib. Our progressive politicians suck right now.
Always has been…
If you’re a Canadian, please contact your MP about bill C-22, and do it now. They’re voting on this in the next few days.
Salt Typhoon, a hacking group connected to the Chinese government, used the backdoors put in place by CALEA in the US to spend months buried deep in US telecoms providers surveilling citizens. The Liberals are proposing to put in place a worse version of those exact same backdoors. Bring this up to your MP, remind them that when the Chinese (or North Koreans, Iranians, Russians, or even Americans) inevitably exploit these backdoors to do the same thing to us, it’s going to blow up in their faces.
Read the link above for more salient points about why this is bad law. Read Open Media’s articles on it (https://openmedia.org/press/item/ottawa-repackages-its-surveillance-backdoor-in-bill-c-22). Bring up these points to your MP. Email them. Phone and demand to speak to them. Make a stink about this.
If nothing else, send the form letter from Open Media (the other options are better, but something is better than nothing); https://action.openmedia.org/page/188754/action/1#main-content
They already tried to pass this law once and it failed. Yes, they have a majority now, but it is a very slim majority. If a few MPs defect this bill will die.
Pretty sure my MP blocked me because their office never respond to my inquiries.
Phone their office, demand to know why you haven’t heard back from them. Make them search through their emails and pull up every message you ever sent. Make them uncomfortable. Be a problem.
What is a reasonable period of time to give them to respond to an email? They could be absolutely inundated with complaints, and it would be unreasonable to expect them to move particularly fast.
My MP told me to fuck off and that it was a good thing.
I’m not sure what you feel like you’re adding with this reply.
Well done for making the effort. Thank you, and we all appreciate it.
But what do you want other people to take from this? Are you trying to discourage other people from taking action? Because you encountered resistance other people shouldn’t try at all, even though they might end up speaking to someone more receptive?
Even your MP may end up changing their mind if enough people speak up. The goal is not to single-handedly sway their opinion, it’s to add your voice to a growing chorus. You’re joining a movement, not fighting a solo battle.
I live in Quebec, my MP masturbates to videos of Donald Trump and times his nut for when Trump makes fun of the handicapped journalist.
I like how you throw in ‘even the Americans’ with the spying groups. We definitely spy in all our allies. And in return we encourage our allies to spy on us. It is a very calculated political game where we (all the allied countries) pass legislation and safeguards in our respective home countries and declare our citizens free of authoritarian government surveillance, but then work with the other countries spy agencies to do it for us. We intentionally put in the backdoors in our peoples networks and hand the keys to our partners just so we can say ‘well I wasn’t spying on you. That would be illegal!’ But in the end it is effectively the same. If the allied government finds anything of interest they just send a notification over. We each have boundaries that we respect in spying on each other’s people too. It is almost a formallity by this point.
And all of that would be fine if they were still acting like an ally.
Based on what happened with their e-mail, I imagine if the courts mandated IP logging for VPNs, Proton would still advertise their no-logs policy until they get caught out in a scandal and then silently update their marketing material & privacy policy afterwards. lol
ProtonMail 2018:
Now, Swiss courts have never tried to force us to log IPs, and the law is not completely clearly if we have to comply or not. If we got such a request, we would probably fight it just to test this out.
Did they ever end up fighting anything out? lol
I doubt they did - they only speak up for the fictional customer, meanwhile silently complying to whatever government requests user data from them.
They still don‘t log your IP and advocate to not even give them your data, though. If you give them your credit card number and then use their services to sell illegal substances and if authorities of your country then find your e-mail address and contact Proton about it then their hands are pretty much tied. If you use one of their offered anonymous ways to pay for their services then there is nothing they can give authorities. Ultimately it‘s your job to take care of your identity and Proton offers ways to protect it.
Ah yes, Proton, infamous for being the knee and ratting out activists to the authorities, pretends it has any semblance of a spine left.
Some Proton Employee really contacted me here on lemmy to basically say that Proton could never do anything malicious, because they are owned by a non profit. Then how the heck can OpenAI be this scummy when they are also owned by a non profit? (See my Comment History)
Protons PR Team is so scummy. They spread misinformation about themselves in public forums and pay Content Creators to say incorrect things about online privacy to sell products to customers that don’t need those products.it probably has to do with the different rules between the US and Switzerland
every single one of those cases was the activist fucking up basic opsec not proton. They are open about the metadata stored and that they can be forced to comply by court order.
They were following a court order and only provided account metadata.
They’ll say anything just to distract their users away from them being caught red handed in the act of giving away their data to the governments all around the world.
Classic business marketing.
I kinda want to read more into it before I move all my services from Proton, do you have some links?
And do you have an alternative I can use?
Maybe those activists should‘ve chosen anonymity over convenience. Proton offers ways to protect yourself. They just take a little bit of effort.
JFC were losing the internet everywhere… we’re just slaves to nation-states and corporations…
Turns out voting for conservatives has consequences.
Joke’s on you, in the UK we have a “left wing” government and they’re doing the best they can to fight against privacy!
Oh wait… I guess the joke’s on us nvm.
Yeah… I pay attention to UK politics mostly to avoid hyper focusing on depressing domestic politics, and it’s devastating to see Labor shit the bed the way they have.
Like, you guys are supposed to be better than us (it’s a low bar)! But they squandered their mandate in the most perverse and infuriating way. I’m sorry. Shit sucks.
Anyway, that’s my half-assed perspective from listening to Pod Save the UK, the Bugle, and reading the occasional article.
the UK has it rough. They have a dogshit conservative government for a decade and then get pissed when the left cant clean it up in a single term. Also most of the voters are still falling for conservative outrage bait drumming up a ton of distraction issues like migrant crime and rape gangs.
Labour isn’t the left. Keir Starmer lied about everything to become the leader of the Labour Party as the face of Morgan McSweeney, Steve Reed and Peter Mandelson’s “Labour Together” right wing project because they knew the membership, which is generally centre left, would never vote for them if they were honest about their intentions. They hid 75% of their donations until after the contest was over, violating electoral law.
Lo and behold, they’re doing disability cuts, trans moral panic, privacy violations, outsourcing to American tech barons and clamping down on protest rights. Starmer suspended several MPs early on for voting against the government’s policy of keeping the two child cap on benefits.
However, you are partially right that the right wing press still doesn’t approve of them and are manufacturing dissent, despite Labour’s cruel anti-migrant and pro-capital policies.
To be fair, the issue (or at least my point) here is not that they didn’t magically fix everything. It’s that they actively introduced things (like the online safety act) and are continuing to pursue things (like extending it to vpns) which didn’t exist before and are hostile towards online privacy.
I do agree about the general mentality being outrage based which benefits the right.
It’s actually quite interesting to look at the party manifestos in England Vs Scotland for the same parties. Reform UK has seen some success in the recent Scottish election and I believe part of it is that their “Scottish” manifesto reads closer to a regular conservative party (so only medium insane), whereas it’s batshit insane in England. I don’t think a lot of people compare those, despite it being the same party.
I don’t understand your comment, I thought liberals had a majority government…?
They did, this guy is just being edgy and predictable.
Blame all problems on conservatives, even when they’re not in power. Libdippers can do no wrong. /s
I mean, the Libs are doing everything I’d expect from Stephen Harper’s Bank of Canada guy and the Tory’s Bank of England guy.
Not being able to tell if the Libs or Cons are in charge just feels like more evidence of how far we’ve ratcheted to the right.
I’m sure liberals would pass on the opportunity to have more power and control and would totally thrash the whole thing.
/s, but should be obvious
Liberals have a much better track record with this sort of thing.
are you aware of which party has a majority in canada’s parliament right now
🌍🧑🏻🚀🔫👨🏼🚀
Also they scammed their way (liberals) to a majority by absorbing resigning NDP members and THEN they pushed this bullshit. They’re anti democratic and aligned with the pedo elite in reducing our lives to nothing since 2020. Cant wait for the revolution to start and ill be among those hanging these bastards by the neck. Idgaf about a list, hi SCRS agent.
Importantly, not to be confused with their email service’s IP logging
This AGAIN? They were ordered by a Swiss court to log the IP accessing the mailbox, (which the court granted because the French authorities cited terrorism as a reason, completely overblown charges). They do NOT log IPs by default, and if you do not comply with court orders of the country you are based in, you can close up shop.
if you do not comply with court orders of the country you are based in, you can close up shop
This is exactly the case for every VPN and network operator. Some take steps to remediate issues around anonymity, and some even offer ways to pay anonymously, but no company is going to break the law for you.
I have issues with Proton’s head being far too conciliatory to Trump, but the email thing wasn’t something they could do anything about, because it’s an inherent flaw with how email works; it was a court order to which they were compelled to comply, whether they wanted to or not.
Also this agai?
There are tons of reports on this bullshit. Yes he is a moron and an idiot that he posted something like that and that he doubled down on it.
But agreeing with a statement from somebody doesn’t mean you completely support that person. If you want to be able to form good discussions you have to look at the opinions from a person on that subject, not how big of an asehole the other person is. That is playing on the man and is going to cause issues.
It’s wild how little people understand about society and how it operates.
Didn’t they also just relocate because of this ruling? I could be mistaken.
They’re moving to Germany, but it’s still ongoing
Yes, they capitulated.
I’m a little more concerned that in your rush to defend them, you seem to be implying that pushing back against the authorities should be the norm, which is way worse than what they’re doing here. Surely an anarchist [sic] can appreciate that.
It’s a reality of our world that if you don’t comply with court orders, the court will make you comply by using force. I’m no fan of that, but that’s something neither me nor any mail provider can prevent.
Also, any business has an interest in not making the cops bash in your doors on the regular; you lose any ability to make the courts side with you when you try to get better outcomes for your costumers if you are known to not comply.
If you’re not a fan of it, take your complaints to Proton.
I appreciate you sounding the alarm that Proton’s PR here is not to be trusted, but you’re acting upset at the messenger.
You seem to be very confused. Your last couple comments do not seem to accurately reflect what the other person is saying.
Also Proton: “metadata logging does not count as logging, and handing our logs, I mean non existent logs that only contains totally useless metadata, over to the Swiss government is fine because its the Swiss law”
I kinda want to see what they handed over. They cannot get around the fact that they need to be able to handover data when legally asked with a warrant.
But I do kinda want to see if it is actually useless metadata or it is just our entire history.
so proton is now a movement.
Proton is not a trustworthy company.
Noone is 100% trust worthy. I’ll still appreciate when they fight for the right things.
I agree nobody is 100% trustworthy, but as a side note Mullvad’s no-log policy has been proven fairly recently after they were raided and the police found nothing at all.
Proton was audited last year https://www.securitum.com/public-reports/securitum-protonvpn-nologs-2025.pdf
Idk how trustworthy securitum is, I don’t know them and I don’t know if these auditers are registered somewhere where you can report them if we later find out they lied.
They’ll fight, until the thing becomes Law, then they’ll stop fighting it because it would mean end of business. And ultimately, killing your business is not a good business decision, it turns out.
I’ll still appreciate
whenif they fight for the right things.Proton has a long history of capitulation.
And they have a history of making promises they don’t keep.
In fact, it’s so bad that Proton defender @Wildmimic@anarchist.nexus wrote a warning about how their statement here is basically not to be trusted.
if 3 lines is a long comment for you, you should read more. For the others:
This AGAIN? They were ordered by a Swiss court to log the IP accessing the mailbox, (which the court granted because the French authorities cited terrorism as a reason, completely overblown charges). They do NOT log IPs by default, and if you do not comply with court orders of the country you are based in, you can close up shop.
Thank you for sounding the alarm about the untrustworthiness of this company. Keep on keeping on, my anarchist friend.
name a VPN company that obstructed a federal court order
deleted by creator
holy shit someone on lemmy made a long comment, you say
What long history of capitulation?
Well, I know there are some cases. But they are still bound by Swiss law, or soon they will not have a company anymore.
It’s not perfect on privacy, but I wouldn’t call it “capitulation” either.
Proton’s homepage has a very different take on Swiss law.
Our technology and business are based upon this fundamentally stronger definition of privacy, backed also by Swiss privacy laws.
Proton is based in Switzerland, and your data does not go to the cloud. Instead, it stays under the protection of some of the world’s strongest privacy laws.
And a very different public message about whether they would capitulate vs defending your freedom.
We are a neutral and safe haven for your personal data, committed to defending your freedom.
Well that’s actually what I said, isn’t it? Swiss law, which they have to abide by. Some of the strongest in the world, but not airtight for people who commit crimes.
The laws protect the company and the users privacy to a certain extent, but that also means Proton have the responsibility to uphold that law, or the law will be meaningless.
Getting into trouble by repeatedly purposely breaking the law is probably the easiest way for a company to get disbanded. No other companies will work with you, your server contracts will not be extended and you won’t get anything done.
And neutral is also probably a lawful type of neutral, judging from the many times they mention the law :)
Sure. Tuta is better though.
No, it isn’t.
Oh pray tell how so? Because proton not only accepts people on blacklists as deserving to be there with no way to appeal, despite you know, things. But they also removed like thousands of people that the US government said they were suspicious of they sent them a list and they suspended all their email accounts, no appeal nothing. Based on the word of the United States government, a famously untrustworthy source. I say that as United States citizen.
Because proton not only accepts people on blacklists as deserving to be there with no way to appeal, despite you know, things
You’re going to have to elaborate or rephrase this because I have no idea what you’re trying to say here
they also removed like thousands of people that the US government said they were suspicious of they sent them a list and they suspended all their email accounts, no appeal nothing. Based on the word of the United States government, a famously untrustworthy source. I say that as United States citizen.
No they didn’t.
First of all the second part was in the news just like 6 9 months ago, I might not have an entirely right but that’s generally what they did, they took the word off governments over people. Second of all I happen to know they accept blacklists as trustworthy, I know because someone who isn’t me is on one and they refused them an account.
In truth they are Israel’s bitch. In short.
I might not have an entirely right but that’s generally what they did, they took the word off governments over people
No they didn’t. Thats not “generally” what they did at all. You’re just spreading more misinformation that you admittedly aren’t even very confident about.
Second of all I happen to know they accept blacklists as trustworthy, I know because someone who isn’t me is on one and they refused them an account.
Do you have any proof of this? Or are you just going with “I heard from a guy”?
Is it this, or something else?
https://theintercept.com/2025/09/12/proton-mail-journalist-accounts-suspended/
I’ve been following this on X/Twitter and I think one of the most egregious things that’s important to point out is that folks from Phrack reached out to Proton in private multiple times, and Proton ghosted them. Proton only engaged with them and then reinstated the accounts after Phrack went public and their X/Twitter post went viral. It also looks like one of the writers filed an appeal with Proton and Proton denied the appeal, so they manually investigated the incident and refused to reinstate the account and then only did after this got attention on X/Twitter.
Because, for some reason on Lemmy, people think Proton is above criticism, and will defend the corporation’s false claims of fighting for their users when we have article after article proving the opposite
They’re not at all above criticism. The thing is all we have in the way of criticism is article after article of misinformation born from either technical ignorance or deliberate misrepresentation of the facts. None of which stand up to a moments scrutiny, much less “prove” anything.
On the more innocent side of the scale, you’ll have people chastising Proton over negatives that are entirely out of their control, and exist because they have to when operating as a public email provider. Then those same people will point people to alternatives like Fastmail or Tutanota that have all the same problems, but are less transparent about it.
Like if you want to make an argument against public email providers as a whole you can surely do so, but so far there’s really no evidence that Proton is anything but as good as you are reasonably going to get if you do decide to use one.
all we have in the way of criticism is article after article of misinformation
Ironic you made misinformation to claim this. It’s a strawman. Anyway
negatives that are entirely out of their control
No, it’s their false advertisement that claims it is within their control.
I’d like to see those “articles over articles” that do not reference the one case that is cited over and over please.
You already educated everybody here that Proton is not to be trusted when it comes to logging. What do I get out of talking to you further, my anarchist friend? If you see a couple more articles, will you make a post condemning Proton’s false advertisement?
