this post was submitted on 20 May 2026
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Kinda have to comply with laws mate
Yes, that is why them advertising as a privacy respecting company in a country whose laws force them to respect privacy has always been dumb. Literally every email provider has to follow the same law there hence their security theatre to sell overpriced access to email and their ever growing walled garden.
They don't have access to your email... They never did. They have some unencrypted metadata and your encrypted mail
Trust me it is bad. I guess perhaps you could say it is a problem with the system, but then you have to admit the service that shall not be named is nothing special.
https://cambridgeanalytica.org/news/protonmail-s-logging-trap-how-privacy-theater-enables-the-post-cambridge-analytica-surveillance-state-50339/
They are not a Canadian company though, so they don't have to comply with Canadian laws.
They do not have to comply with Canadian laws unless they want to operate in Canada. Then they have to comply.
Do they comply with Chinese, Russian or American laws then?
China and Russia - Proton VPN does not work there.
USA - it works. Is there some laws I dont know about that USA has in order to gather data from VPN providers?
It works sometimes, and Proton did not stop providing services there, you can buy their vpn, the government just blocks the protocols.
The US has a law that may require you to add backdoors to your software. Do they have to comply with that one in your opinion?
May and must are two different words. May they implement or must they implement?
Ability to get a subscription of Proton VPN in China and Russia doesn't necessarily mean that they are not blocked. If you can get a subscription to a service your country desperately is trying to block, it is probably not in a straight "go to website, pay, get service" way. You probably had to find workarounds to get it. That does not count as "operating in this country".
It is like "Amazon does not operate in this country", but you got a friend in the one which does, so you just order form him and ask him to send goods by post.
Seems you are confused how those blocks work so let's talk about their services that are definitely not blocked like mail. You can easily and legally buy their mail service in those countries. Do they have to comply with their laws with their mail service?
Didn't understand your answer about the US laws. If some judge in the US decides that Proton need to make a backdoor, what happens then?
If they want to operate in canada they do
That’s not how any of this works.
How does it work?
They do business in Canada and with Canadians, so are subject to Canadian regulations for those activities.
Ford still has to comply with French law when they sell cars in France. GDPR applies to any business anywhere in the world if they interact with EU citizens.
Let's imagine they don't comply. What will happen then?
Fines
What happens if they don't pay?
Prosecution. This isn’t complex.
Who will prosecute them in Switzerland and for what? They didn't break any Swiss laws.