You need to understand a few things. In order to keep email service usable, Proton need to fight any malicious activity. If they didn’t do it, ProtonMail would be quickly blacklisted by other mail providers as it will be interpreted as source of spam. At the same time, they have very limited capabilities to verify this activity by themselves as they cannot read contents of their user’s emails (it is encrypted) and they keep limited logs.
As an article states, here is what happened:
Proton’s official account replied the following day, stating that Proton had been “alerted by a CERT that certain accounts were being misused by hackers in violation of Proton’s Terms of Service. This led to a cluster of accounts being disabled. Our team is now reviewing these cases individually to determine if any can be restored.” Proton then stated that they “stand with journalists” but “cannot see the content of accounts and therefore cannot always know when anti-abuse measures may inadvertently affect legitimate activism.”
So they simply suspend accounts because “they are evil, trust me bro” and only maybe investigate after? This is either stupid, negligent and/or bullshit.
Maybe I am misunderstanding something here, but this does seem like it could be ripe for abuse. Say I disliked a journalist and knew their proton mail. Could I report it as abuse and have them suspended?
False story.
I never trusted them to begin with
