- cross-posted to:
- Technology@programming.dev
- cross-posted to:
- Technology@programming.dev
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I see I’m not the only one who is sceptical of that E2E “encryption”
Proton is shifting as mainstream company. AI craps, false misleading advertising.
Welp, it’s time to move the entirety of all of my accounts to another email provider. Again. Ugh.
Ditto. But I am taking my time. I am on the free tier; I cost him money. I’ll move off eventually probably to Tutanota unless something better shows up
Okay but are any AI chatbots really open source? Isn’t half the headache with LLMs the fact that there comes a point where it’s basically impossible for even the authors to decode the tangled madness of their machine learning?
Yes, several are fully open source. I like Mistral
Yeah but you don’t open source the LLM, you open source the training code and the weights and the specs/architecture
what do you think an LLM is? once you’ve opened the weights, IMO it’s pretty open. Once they open the training data, that’s pretty damn open. What do you want a gitian reproducible build?
First of all…
Why does an email service need a chatbot, even for business? Is it an enhanced search over your emails or something? Like, what does it do that any old chatbot wouldn’t?
EDIT: Apparently nothing. It’s just a generic Open Web UI frontend with Proton branding, a no-logs (but not E2E) promise, and kinda old 12B-32B class models, possibly finetuned on Proton documentation (or maybe just a branded system prompt). But they don’t use any kind of RAG as far as I can tell.
There are about a bajillion of these, and one could host the same thing inside docker in like 10 minutes.
…On the other hand, it has no access to email I think?
Why does an email service need a chatbot, even for business?
they are not only an email service, for quite some time now
There are about a bajillion of these, and one could host the same thing inside docker in like 10 minutes.
sure, with a thousand or two dollars worth of equipment and then computer knowledge. Anyone could do it really. but even if not, why don’t they just rawdog deepseek? I don’t get it either
…On the other hand, it has no access to email I think?
that’s right. you can upload files though, or select some from your proton drive, and can do web search.
sure, with a thousand or two dollars worth of equipment and then computer knowledge. Anyone could do it really. but even if not, why don’t they just rawdog deepseek? I don’t get it either
What I mean is there are about 1000 different places to get 32B class models via Open Web UI with privacy guarantees.
With mail, vpn, (and some of their other services?) they have a great software stack and cross integration to differentiate them, but this is literally a carbon copy of any Open Web UI service… There is nothing different other than the color scheme and system prompt.
I’m not trying to sound condescending, but it really feels like a cloned “me too,” with the only value being the Proton brand and customer trust.
There’s some good discussion about the security in the comments, so I’m just going to say that Lumo’s Android app required the Play Store and GPlay Services. I uninstalled.
It’s also quite censored. I gave Proton’s cute chatbot a chance, but I’m not impressed.
The worst part is that once again, proton is trying to convince its users that it’s more secure than it really is. You have to wonder what else they are lying or deceiving about.
We really need to audit Proton
Mullvad FTW
Yes, indeed. Even so, just because there is a workaround, we should not ignore the issue (governments descending into fascism).
Very true
Sauce?
Zero-access encryption
Your chats are stored using our battle-tested zero-access encryption, so even we can’t read them, similar to other Proton services such as Proton Mail, Proton Drive, and Proton Pass.
from protons own website.
And why this is not true is explained in the article from the main post as well as easily figured out with a little common sense (AI can’t respond to messages it can’t understand, so the AI must decrypt them).
Proton has my vote for fastest company ever to completely enshittify.
How have they enshittified? I haven’t noticed anything about their service get worse since they started.
Does it even count as enshittifying if they were born that way?
They Did have a good idea in the begining. Tutanova remains.
OK, so I just checked the page:
Looks like a generic Open Web UI instance, much like Qwen’s: https://openwebui.com/
Based on this support page, they are using open models and possibly finetuning them:
https://proton.me/support/lumo-privacy
The models we’re using currently are Nemo, OpenHands 32B, OLMO 2 32B, and Mistral Small 3
But this information is hard to find, and they aren’t particularly smart models, even for 32B-class ones.
Still… the author is incorrect, they specify how long requests are kept:
When you chat with Lumo, your questions are sent to our servers using TLS encryption. After Lumo processes your query and generates a response, the data is erased. The only record of the conversation is on your device if you’re using a Free or Plus plan. If you’re using Lumo as a Guest, your conversation is erased at the end of each session. Our no-logs policy ensures wekeep no logs of what you ask, or what Lumo replies. Your chats can’t be seen, shared, or used to profile you.
But it also mentions that, as is a necessity now, they are decrypted on the GPU servers for processing. Theoretically they could hack the input/output layers and the tokenizer into a pseudo E2E encryption scheme, but I haven’t heard of anyone doing this yet… And it would probably be incompatible with their serving framework (likely vllm) without some crack CUDA and Rust engineers (as you’d need to scramble the text and tokenize/detokenize it uniquely for scrambled LLM outer layers for each request).
They are right about one thing: Proton all but advertise Luma as E2E when that is a lie. Per its usual protocol, Open Web UI will send the chat history for that particular chat to the server for each requests, where it is decoded and tokenized. If the GPU server were to be hacked, it could absolutely be logged and intercepted.
Any business putting “privacy first” thing that works only on their server, and requires full access to plaintext data to operate, should be seen as lying.
I’ve been annoyed by proton for a long while; they do (did?) provide a seemingly adequate service, but claims like “your mails are safe” when they obviously had to have them in plaintext on their server, even if only for compatibility with current standards, kept me away from them.
they obviously had to have them in plaintext on their server, even if only for compatibility with current standards
I don’t think that’s obvious at all. On the contrary, that’s a pretty bold claim to make, do you have any evidence that they’re doing this?
Incoming Emails that aren’t from proton, or PGP encrypted (which are like 99% of emails), arrives at Proton Servers via TLS which they decrypt and then have the full plaintext. This is not some conspiracy, this is just how email works.
Now, Proton and various other “encrypted email” services then take that plaintext and encypt it with your public key, then store the ciphertext on their servers, and then they’re supposed to discard the plaintext, so that in case of a future court order, they wouldn’t have the plaintext anymore.
But you can’t be certain if they are lying, since they do necessarily have to have access to the plaintext for email to function. So “we can’t read your emails” comes with a huge asterisk, it onlu applies to those sent between Proton accounts or other PGP encrypted emails, your average bank statement and tax forms are all accessible by Proton (you’re only relying on their promise to not read it).
Ok yeah thats a far cry from Proton actually “Having your unencrypted emails on their servers” as if they’re not encrypted at rest.
There’s the standard layer of trust you need to have in a third party when you’re not self hosting. Proton has proven so far that they do in fact encrypt your emails and haven’t given any up to authorities when ordered to so I’m not sure where the issue is. I thought they were caught not encrypting them or something.
We need to call for an audit on Protons policy and see if they actually do what they say, that way we can know for almost certain that everything is good as they say
I mean we know from documented events that Proton doesn’t store you emails in plain text because there have been Swiss orders to turn over information which they have to comply with and they’ve never turned in emails, because they can’t.
Do you have a source for that? I know they handed over an IP address, but I haven’t heard about them handing over an email.
As far as I know they have not handed over any emails.
Ok yeah thats a far cry from Proton actually “Having your unencrypted emails on their servers” as if they’re not encrypted at rest.
See my other reply. There is no way to retrieve your mail using IMAP on a regular client if they’re encrypted on the server. And Gmail can retrieve your mails from proton using IMAP. It’s even in their own (proton’s) documentation.
Agreed.
Really, if someone wants to use an LLM, the right place to run it is in a sandbox locally on your own computer
Anything else is just a stupid architecture. You don’t run your Second Brain on Someone Else’s Computer
There is no way to retrieve your mail using IMAP on a regular client if they’re encrypted on the server.
That is probably why you can’t retrieve your emails using IMAP from a regular client.
And Gmail can retrieve your mails from proton using IMAP. It’s even in their own (proton’s) documentation.
I don’t think it can. Where in the documentation did you find that?
And Gmail can retrieve your mails from proton using IMAP. It’s even in their own (proton’s) documentation.I don’t think it can. Where in the documentation did you find that?
An online search brought me here : https://www.getmailbird.com/setup/en/access-protonmail-com-via-imap-smtp which did looks like a documentation page about how to do exactly that. Obviously, it has nothing to do with them, and the actual details makes no sense the lower you get in the page. I’ve been had :)
They still can see most mails transit from their service in plaintext in both directions, though, which remain a privacy issue, but it has more to do with email protocols than anything.
You’re right that they can see the emails in transit if you’re not using encryption, but they never said they can’t. They are as secure as they can possibly be, and are honest about what’s secure and what’s not. I would leave Protonmail at the first sniff of trouble but I just haven’t seen anything that concerning.
Now, Proton and various other “encrypted email” services then take that plaintext and encypt it with your public key, then store the ciphertext on their servers, and then they’re supposed to discard the plaintext, so that in case of a future court order, they wouldn’t have the plaintext anymore.
You would not be able to retrieve your mails using IMAP from a regular mail client if they were doing that. You can even retrieve them from Gmail, which is unlikely to support any kind of “bring your own private key to decrypt mails from IMAP”.
Yes. They support IMAP. Which means, IMAP client can read your mails from the server. IMAP protocol does not support encryption, so any mail that does not add another layer of encryption (like GPG with encryption) implies that your mail is available in plaintext through IMAP, and as such, on the server.
If that’s not enough, when you send a mail to a third party that just use plain, old regular mail, it is sent from their (proton’s) SMTP server, in plaintext. Again, unless you add a layer of encryption (assuming the recipient understands it, too), it’s plaintext. On the servers.
Receiving is the same; if someone sends a mail to your proton address, is shows up in full plaintext on their SMTP server. Whatever they do after that (and we’ve established it’s not client-controlled encryption), they have access to it.
In the case of GPG with encryption (not only for signature), then the message is encrypted everywhere (assuming your “sent” folder is configured properly). But that requires both you and the other party to support that, which have nothing to do with proton; you could as well do that over gmail.
So, no, not a bold claim. The very basic of how emails standards works requires it.
Now, I’m not saying that Proton have nefarious plans or anything. It is very possible that they act in good faith when they say they “don’t snoop”, and maybe they even have some proper monitoring so that admin have a somewhat hard time to check in the data without leaving a trace, but it’s 100% in clear up there as long as you’re not adding your own layer of encryption on top of it, and as such, you, as the user, have to be aware of that. It might be fully encrypted at rest to prevent a third party from fetching a drive and getting data, logs might be excessively scrubbed to remove all trace of from/to addresses (something very common in logs, for maintenance purpose), they might have built-in encryption in their own clients that implement gpg or anything between their users, and they might even do it properly with full client-side controlled keypairs, but the mail content? Have to be available, or the service could not operate.
Protonmail does not support IMAP, what they have is a program called Proton Bridge that locally decrypts you email then you can set it up so that your IMAP client then reads from Proton Bridge, giving you a seamless experience with one email client having access to all your email accounts.
They support IMAP. Which means, IMAP client can read your mails from the server.
Proton mail does not support IMAP. Because your emails are encrypted on the server.
Again, unless you add a layer of encryption (assuming the recipient understands it, too), it’s plaintext. On the servers.
Protonmail doesn’t claim that non-protonmail email is end to end encrypted. Any emails sent to a regular email without third party encryption will be plain text through the SMTP server, but they don’t store it. So in this case they are still not storing your emails in plaintext. Your recipient will, but that’s out of Protonmail’s control.
shows up in full plaintext on their SMTP server. Whatever they do after that (and we’ve established it’s not client-controlled encryption), they have access to it.
You’ve not established that at all. Protonmail stores that message with client side encryption and they have no access to it. Nothing you’ve brought up here suggests that anything is stored in plaintext on Protonmail servers.
I’ll just repost the same message here, for completion sake.
Well, I’ve been had. There is no IMAP support indeed, during my quick lookup around it, I ended up on a website that does look a lot like a real documentation that claim it does. My bad.
The point about sending and receiving messages in cleartext stands, as SMTP works that way, but at rest it is possible they’re keeping them encrypted.
Well, I’ve been had. There is no IMAP support indeed, during my quick lookup around it, I ended up on a website that does look a lot like a real documentation that claim it does. My bad.
The point about sending and receiving messages in cleartext stands, as SMTP works that way, but at rest it is possible they’re keeping them encrypted.
This was it for me, cancelled my account. Fuck this Andy moron
see, i’m saying this. that guy ain’t to be trusted.
Since there’s already good discussion in the comments about this, I’m just going to add that Lumo’s Android app requires the Play Store and GPlay Services. I uninstalled.
From my testing on the website, it’s also very censored. I gave Proton’s cute private chatbot a chance, but I’m not impressed.
Who Proton??? Nooo come on… who could ever seen this coming? 🐸🍲
