Ho there! Once again a new tool has been invented for the people just out of the need to hide from prying eyes of self-proclaimed grand-master of the world – USA and its right hand – the NSA.
After LavaBit went down against NSA policies, there seemed no existence of privacy online for a long period of time. All the giants – Google/Microsoft/Facebook etc. have always been tracking your location, choices, searches, likes, posts … (the list can go on and on until it includes almost everything we do or want to do). That is the reason for the phrase – “Facebook knows us better than ourselves”. This is why all those who knew and understood this were trying to find another veil to hide from the NSA. Well everybody knows the feeling of constantly tracking eyes from somewhere in their life.
ProtonMail
And now comes ProtonMail – claiming to provide the veil, the security, the encryption and that too for FREE. It has been developed by a bunch of MIT and Harvard students who came together “by a shared vision of a more secure and private Internet”. It is claimed to be safer than LavaBit actually.
According to the developers, the benefits of Proton Mail are:
1. Legal Jurisdiction
ProtonMail’s parent corporation is incorporated in Switzerland. So, all user data is protected by the Swiss Federal Data Protection Act(DPA) and the Swiss Federal Data Protection Ordinance which offers some of the strongest privacy protection in the world for both individuals and entities. Only a court order from the Cantonal Court of Geneva or the Swiss Federal Supreme Court can compel the release of collected user information.
2. Zero Access to User Data
As the developers claim, they don’t have any access to user data. ProtonMail’s segregated authentication and decryption system means logging into a ProtonMail account that requires two passwords. The first password is used to authenticate the user and retrieve the correct account. After that, encrypted data is sent to the user. The second password is a decryption password which is never sent to them. It is used to decrypt the user’s data in the browser so they never have access to the decrypted data, or the decryption password. For this reason, they are also unable to do password recovery. If you forget your decryption password, they cannot recover your data.
3. End-to-End Encryption
Messages are fully encrypted at all times. Messages are stored on ProtonMail servers in encrypted format. They are also transmitted in encrypted format between their server and users’ browsers. Messages between ProtonMail users are transmitted in encrypted form completely within their secured server network. Because users never leave the secured environment, there is no possibility to intercept the encrypted messages enroute.
4. 100% Anonymous
No tracking or logging of personally identifiable information. Unlike competing services, ProtonMail does not log user activity. It does not save any metadata such as the IPs used to connect to accounts, or the times certain accounts are accessed. It utilizes Google Analytics on only its homepage, but it has no ability to match that data with specific user accounts.
5. Self-Destructing Messages
Here, E-mails are no longer permanent. You can set an optional expiration time on ProtonMail’s encrypted emails, so they will be automatically deleted from the recipient’s inbox once they have expired. This way there are no “trails” of sent messages. Similar to SnapChat in a way, they’ve added a way for you to have even more ephemeral communication.
And Yeah! with these many reasons, they have received an overwhelming response which has surpassed their initial server capacity. Of course they are increasing no. of servers and you can request an Invite along with a desired mail-id. And good news is first batch of Invites have already been sent. So, move fast… and give it a try. Request an Invite here.
Post Originally Shared from : ritwiktweaks.wordpress.com
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