Also: if we have credible evidence that your account has been misbehaving (e.g. spams, scams, etc with the headers that show they originated from your authenticated connection) then we'll investigate to see if you're a bad actor breaking our terms of service or just some poor soul who had their credentials stolen.
And if your account is the subject of an Australian warrant, and a judge has been convinced that there's cause to access your individual data, then we don't place ourselves above the law. We consider ourselves good citizens of the world, and that includes working with law enforcement where they have a warrant.
What we don't do is sell your data or profile you in order to allow you to be targeted by those wishing to exert undue influence based on knowledge gleaned from your private communications. That's the privacy that's being bought and sold by many in the current world, and leading to poor consequences. We stand firm against the sale and manipulation of people's private electronic memory.
We don't snoop on you, but we'll help you fix your account if you mess it up, and we'll get your access back if you forget your password (a friend of mine lost her entire email history when she forgot her password while using one of the heavy encryption services... oops. Security is about availability and integrity as well).
Our support team is on your side, because we only have one paymaster, and that's our customer.
Their servers are also located in the US, so they're accessible to three-letter agencies as well.
I recently switched to a German service. Data can still be silently disclosed but only if there's imminent danger or a judge issues a warrant. Of course the service is covered by GDPR and European regulators as well.
For me mailbox.org ended up being slightly cheaper.
In terms of features and UX I've found them comparable.
Whether or not that person works in support is an interesting but somewhat minor detail. It would be advisable not to use an Australian provider for your data if that is important to you.
This understanding is wrong. Secure encryption is perfectly legal, tech media simply likes to overreact to laws without actually reading them.
The underlying law that lead to this widespread misconception requires Australian companies to assist law enforcement in acquiring communications but only when it can be done in such a way that nobody else is affected [0].
The example I usually use to illustrate what this means is:
- The law could potentially compel WhatsApp to add code to their application that checks for a particular hard-coded user ID (i.e. new IDs have to be pushed through the app signing and update process) and when the user with that ID sends or receives a message, a plaintext copy is sent to law enforcement.
- The law could _not_ compel WhatsApp to add a law enforcement key to every message or to otherwise weaken their encryption or security in anyway.
[0]: http://classic.austlii.edu.au/au/legis/cth/consol_act/ta1997...
Secure by design includes ideas like the pipe forgetting what it transmitted after it finishes transmitting it.
Apparently they have strict policies in place to first ask users for consent first whenever they need to, seems good to me (happy customer of pobox since 1997 / fastmail since 2013).
The forwebmaster method (legacy names 'r' us) is very useful for debugging issues like display problems with various types of message (often this is an issue with poorly encoded messages where the character set name is invalid or the encoding is broken, and we fix them by adding another hack to our server to detect and repair that particular type of error). We don't explicitly ask for consent to look at forwebmaster, because the process of creating that folder and putting messages in there is an active request for them to be examined.
For more complex issues which require more visibility into the contents of an account, support agents can request full access. For this they need to provide a reason, and that reason describes how they obtained consent or other reasonable grounds for examining this particular account - e.g. evidence of abuse where the determination needs to be made whether to temporarily lock the account as stolen or close it as entirely fraudulent.
