Not endorsing what happened but all tech firms have to comply with local laws. Like many big corporations Apple even has a team dedicated to complying with law enforcement requests. In this case Proton was obliged by a court order to disclose what they had. They would have had a lot less to disclose if the subject had practiced good digital hygiene.
The only problem is that if you go to the Proton sub they heavily imply that the reason their services cost so much is because they’re in Switzerland which is magically supposed to protect you.
I get that they have to comply with legal requests. That’s the point. Having offices and servers in Switzerland, and the extra costs associated with that, can’t be justified.
There are plenty of other companies offering secure email, VPNs, password managers, etc that are in non-US jurisdictions and would have to comply with pretty much the same legal requests.
So why did Proton constantly sell the fact that they were in Switzerland as some sort of privacy win?
They’re a shady company.
Like, when they did their big redesign awhile back, they announced on Reddit that existing users would be grandfathered in to any price increases.
Tons of users raced to buy or renew their subscriptions and I even said on Reddit, “Given that Proton is already the most expensive private email service, you’re not raising prices so this heads up that a price change is coming is just a huge cash grab.”
Their rep staunchly denied it was a cash grab.
Lo and behold, they announced their new pricing and all they did was bundle more services into their plans.
Many of the people that had jumped up in plans to lock in the lower costs suddenly realized that they were fine with the tier that they had been at and tried to get refunds which were denied, credit only.
The whole thing was intended to FOMO people into upgrading.
Like i say, a privacy company that isn’t transparent in its marketing isn’t a privacy company.
