What Proton sell you is reduction of anxiety. But that's a lie.

The whole idea of encrypted email is pointless. There's absolutely no guarantee it's encrypted in transit or encrypted at rest on any machines it transits through unless you encapsulate the messages with PGP and then you still leave a trail of envelopes everywhere. Any government who wants your data will come round and beat it out of you or the provider as best as they can. And if you have the pay the provider, as evidenced here, they can point to you and then beat you for it. Beating being metaphorical or otherwise.

Use any old shitty email provider and make sure you can move off it quickly if you need to. Standard IMAP, not weird ass proprietary stuff like proton. Think carefully what you do and say. Use a side channel for anything that actually requires security.

As a long time Proton customer...I am fairly certain Proton has always been completely upfront that they will comply with lawful requests for information from the Swiss authorities, if response is obligated by Swiss law. Therefore this isn't especially surprising.

I don't think any commercial entity can be trusted to break the law on behalf of customers who only pay a small fee each

In this case, it was Swiss courts who forced them to comply, not foreign courts.

And from what little I can tell from the article, it was account payment data, not content from the account.

Proton was never designed or advertised to resist this kind of threat.

Given they were praising Trump, Vance, and gang - I called it then.

I cancelled my Proton account when all of that hit Mastodon. Their VPN was good, but I dont support nazies and their toadies.