From what I’ve seen and read, Proton sit on their thumbs until Phrack used their twitter to publicly complain to Proton, and the CEO being afraid of bad advertising, forced its company to do something.
In reality, Proton never explained why it took so long to reinstate the accounts, why the accounts were blocked in the first place (beyond the ambiguity of ToS violation) nor which CERT had abused their authority.
Dante (the Proton support guy) told Saber that their account “has been disabled as a result of a direct connection to an account that was taken down due to violations of our terms and conditions while being used in a malicious manner.” Dante also provided a link to Proton’s terms of service, going on to state, “We have clearly indicated that any account used for unauthorized activities, will be sanctioned accordingly.” The response concluded by stating, “We consider that allowing access to your account will cause further damage to our service, therefore we will keep the account suspended.”
So the journalist didn’t get any chance of appeal nor any clarification beyond “here’s a list of no-nos, guess which want I think you did”.
If you’ve never had to contact Proton support, 2-5 business days just to get someone to say “hello, we started a ticket” is absolutely normal from my experience. Once they’ve opened the conversion, it goes faster, but anyone is guaranteed a wait of days.
From what I’ve seen and read, Proton sit on their thumbs until Phrack used their twitter to publicly complain to Proton, and the CEO being afraid of bad advertising, forced its company to do something.
In reality, Proton never explained why it took so long to reinstate the accounts, why the accounts were blocked in the first place (beyond the ambiguity of ToS violation) nor which CERT had abused their authority.
So the journalist didn’t get any chance of appeal nor any clarification beyond “here’s a list of no-nos, guess which want I think you did”.
I’m very disappointed in Proton.
If you’ve never had to contact Proton support, 2-5 business days just to get someone to say “hello, we started a ticket” is absolutely normal from my experience. Once they’ve opened the conversion, it goes faster, but anyone is guaranteed a wait of days.