Proton is considering recycling old email addresses that still receive misdirected mail and appear in breach data, raising serious privacy concerns.
What a stupid, nothingburger article.
The company is considering releasing millions of old email addresses that were originally created by bots in its early years. These accounts were disabled almost immediately, but the addresses lived on. […] The problem is that many of these addresses are extremely common.
So what? The author rambles about the horrors of getting emails from people who have accidentally written in a generic email handle. It’s not a huge deal. Tons of people using other email services like Outlook and Gmail also have generic usernames, it’s a user’s choice on whether to get one or not. These are old bot accounts that have been disabled for almost a decade, so it’s not like somebody would send emails assuming it was the old person using the handle.
Proton says it wants community feedback, which is good, but the fact that it is even considering such a reckless idea makes me question the company’s judgment.
“I’m mad that the company is surveying their community”, great argument.
I have never heard of an email provider that will hold your address for you forever, paid or free. This post makes no sense.
That’s how Gmail worked. Things never got released, once a username is taken I’m it’s gone.
Til. Thanks.
My Hotmail and Yahoo! accounts from the late 90s are still good and I don’t touch them but maybe once every year or two.
Ai Slop and FUD 🤮
looks like an ai image
Yeah…
No one is going to take your article seriously if you don’t.
nerds.xyz
A great source of information if i ever saw one!
I am confused about how this differs significantly from someone mistyping their e-mail address so that they end up instead typing in someone else’s active e-mail address, because in both cases e-mails get sent to the wrong person.
I usually dont like to criticize art since there was real effort put by real people in it, but that doesnt apply to AI generated images
This may be the most confusing, uninformative, boring image for an article i have ever seen
I’m sure proton would clear the inboxes before making the addresses available, so there’s no risk of seeing legitimate mail meant for someone else.
In terms of misdirected mail there are two types:
- Mistyped email addresses
where a user has made a typo when entering their email somewhere - Randomly typed email addresses
where a user entered a random email when signing up for a service they didn’t care about
Both of these can affect any existing email address (so proton’s plans make no difference), and only type 1 could be a privacy risk.
Email addresses aren’t secret, nor are they personally identifiable (unless they contain your name or are linked with other personal information) so I don’t see a problem here.
Wouldn’t the security risk be that if someone thinks the old user is still using that email address, or forgets, they may mistakenly send sensitive into to the person who now has the address…?
Am I missing something?
The previous owners were bots and the accounts were deactivated by proton shortly after registry
Thank you for correcting me :)
Have you read the article? These are old bot accounts that have been disabled for almost a decade. It’s in the very first line.
Nope, I didn’t, thank you for correcting me :)
I’m a lot better about reading the article than I used to be but sometimes I still don’t and just wanna chat about stuff with folks, and in this case that’s my bad
- Mistyped email addresses
can’t believe a company run by andy yen, who is buddy buddy with the us government, would do something like this.
