The two aren’t mutually exclusive.

Yes. It would save a lot of confusion online if people were more pedantic. One might even call it helping.

No. That’s the point. We have different ideas about what it means to help. I think help is simply doing something (or not doing something) that benefits someone else. You (and others) seem to also give it some additional qualities related to consent, agrement, or support. Since I don’t ascribe any moral judgement to the word and only use its most limited literal meaning, I hope it’s more clear to you how confusing it can be when you infer morality from amoral terms, and try to refrain from doing so in the future. Communication would be much smoother if people were more deliberately literal with their word choice.

It’s a bit like walking through the park every day shouting at people, and not wanting anyone to know who you are. Eventually they’d figure it out.

Since they “helped” the Swiss court by following necessary Swiss law, didn’t they “help” the FBI?

If they didn’t even know the FBI was asking the Swiss courts, one could still say what they they did was “helpful” to the FBI.

You certainly “helped” the terrorists.
I don’t know if you support them. That’s not even the question here.

PiraHxCx said “helped” is a very proactive term. I was asking about the implications of the word helped. Pointing out that it doesn’t necessarily imply anything active. I wasn’t talking about any specific example or event.

Is it proactive? Sometimes doing nothing can be helpful to someone.

Nobody disagrees with what the literal events were. It just seems like some people feel like helping the FBI collect evidence against a suspect is a bad thing, and don’t want to frame Proton that way.

That’s crazy of course. Proton never sold itself as a tool to protect criminals. Nobody want’s them to be that. They need to comply with all legal requests for information. That’s what they’re supposed to do.

If they didn’t they’d be shut down. And the rest of us would loose the reasonable privacy protection we want and they offer. That would be very bad.

Who said Proton did anything wrong?

You say no, then explain exactly how it’s a yes.

Probably.
If the FBI had a proper warrent from a judge, and convinced the Swiss court it’s all good. Then yah, the Swiss ask for the data, Proton will absolutely hand it over. They follow Swiss law. The real content is all encrypted, but the metadata isn’t.

In this case they matched the email address with the guys credit card.

Unless it was some kind of user error. It’s impossible to know with the limited information they’ve given us.

Even if they are being completely honest and truthful, the error message itself is false.

I don’t know, they may not be.
But lying or not, it’s false all the same. You absolutely can share with proton email address. Even proton.me addresses. An error saying you can’t is nonsensical.

The error message isn’t only about SimpleLogin. It lists Proton as blocked first. It doesn’t make sense for an error to explicitly prohibit their own “real” domains. Even if it failed with an email on their domain, they wouldn’t have written an error that specifically intentionally excludes their domain.

When quoting me, you chose to skip a whole sentence in the middle.

One that’s at least in part absolutely false.

The Proton domain is that absolutely false part.

The proper formatting when omitting a section of a quote is to replace it with something like this […] The brackets denote that what’s between is not literally the quoted words, but is an edit of some kind. Usually for clarity, or in this case brevity. Without them it looks like you’re being dishonest in your quotation by making invisible edits. So it should have looked like this.

Truthfully that’s a very strange error message. […] So much so, that I’m doubting the credibility of this.

No idea.
You absolutely can share with other users.

If you used a SimpleLogin address I’m not entirely surprised that wouldn’t work. They aren’t necessarily linked to a Proton account. And even if it is, it’s all about privacy and likely can’t be traced back to exactly which proton account. Not with only the email address to go on.

Truthfully that’s a very strange error message. One that’s at least in part absolutely false. So much so, that I’m doubting the credibility of this.

I’ve seen these kinds of articles a few times.
I’ve never seen anyone claiming VPN = anonymity.
Am I missing something?

I would say none.
Maybe to be a member of a species requires at least a history of a single breeding pair?

Speciesist