It’s more of the latter. Infomaniak is apparently Switzerland’s largest web hosting company, so I wouldn’t be surprised if that gives them an easy in into the E-Mail/Cloud/Office market. At least in Europe. There was a discussion about it on TechLore just a couple of months ago.
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As I said/wrote on many occasions - there is no such thing as the ideal jurisdiction that would respect users privacy and security.
The only viable model for the end users remaining in control of their communications is the network combining multiple small operators, where identities of these operators are known (so they can’t consolidate without end users knowing, like Tor or Session nodes can), and that are located in different jurisdictions.
Quick update as I’ve just spotted it on the top of r/privacy:
Infomaniak employee’s response to supporting mass surveillance: “Are you a war criminal? No? Then why worry?”
It seems that this person had their GitHub linked on their Reddit profile…
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Tbf, we shouldn’t view this as an official response. After all, you had to link with their GitHub profile to find this link out.
I still think it’s a bit weird to reply as an employee of the company in question and try to defend the awful stance they have taken, on a privacy subreddit, and also while referring to the company as “they”. Disingenuous at best, and still very subversive thing to try to do. I also think it offers some insight into the wider culture at the company, which is something always worth considering when choosing vendors.
I’m not really looking at it as an ‘official response’, but an interesting tidbit from someone who works at a company that prides themselves on being “ethical” and different from Big Tech adversaries.
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Last night, noticing the growing interest in this post, I saved the reddit page of the profile “THE_BATTER” because I was sure he would delete all his comments the next day (which indeed happened). So attached here are the screenshots of the comments he had posted.
I don’t understand why the post was deleted on reddit. Link to post: Reddit - The heart of the internet
In addition to that, I wanted to come back one last time to the words of Infomaniak’s spokesperson during a broadcast on Swiss radio and television (link to the broadcast, starts at 55:28: https://www.rts.ch/play/tv/les-beaux-parleurs/video/faire-bonne-figure?urn=urn:rts:video:f357b48c-e80a-3330-b5c6-972e254d401f).
At 59:16, just after the spokesman had criticized skepticism about a proposed surveillance law - citing Switzerland as a model of democracy - a participant pointed out that the same country had recently surveilled all its citizens. The spokesman, however, completely ignored the remark and quickly moved on.
Or at 1:08:27, the spokesman says he also has a free proton email address, but only uses it for, and I quote, “junk mail” or “if I’m going to do illegal activities, that’s the first email address I’m going to use”.
Or at 1:09:07, talking about proton mail, he said, and I quote, "the question is what service do we want to support, do we also want to protect pedophiles or networks that are undesirable? And then he goes on to point out that the prisons are full, etc etc.
And these are just a few examples of the many shocking things said by this Infomaniak spokesman. I’ve been an Infomaniak customer for more than 3 years, I’ve really appreciated their products and have often tended to recommend their products to those who want a simple alternative to Google, Apple, Microsoft, etc.. 2 years ago, I migrated to proton for their E2EE, while keeping a close eye on the development of these 2 companies.
And as a French-speaking Swiss (living near Geneva where Infomaniak and Proton have their headquarters), the impression I get is that Infomaniak is trying to publicly harm Proton. They are indeed competitors, but in this broadcast, instead of fighting with Proton to maintain privacy in Switzerland, the spokesman criticized Proton so much, saying that their service was largely used by criminals and that Proton was preventing justice from doing its job, that I’m really sincerely astonished by this stance and behavior.
And lastly, not to make this post even longer, the fact that this Infomaniak employee has deleted all these comments gives me the impression that Infomaniak is hiding a whole other game than what it claims to be doing. This attempt to completely discredit their competitor Proton instead of focusing on the Swiss law proposal, makes me think that Infomaniak has only one thing in mind, expand no matter how.
I’d be happy to read your thoughts on this 
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Hmm…
You should save this page too. Who knows what can happen… 
The more i think about what infomaniak are doing, the more i somehow see they’re trying to gain the favor of the swiss government. Maybe to grab a govt contract or something. Basically a sellout. They clearly did a bait and switch with their “ethical” tagline.
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I didn’t even know Infomaniak had a Subreddit. Thank you for your service!
Yeah, this company is not to be trusted.
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As noted several Reddit posts were removed, but I found this now removed post by Andy Yen interesting. You can still find it on his profile under u/Andy1011000. Unfortunately I don’t have the context of the comment being replied to.
The problem is that’s not how it would work and they are either ignorant, or intentionally lying about it. The revised proposal they voiced support for would require automated mass metadata retention that would be indiscriminate, which would capture everybody’s data, even if you are not suspected of a crime. Furthermore, the proposal would require automated giving data to the police, without court order, and with no possibility to oppose. The police would decide who is an activist or not, and we know many people who are actual activists would simply be deemed to be criminals to get their data. This article goes in depth into this: Die Schweiz ist drauf und dran, Überwachungsstaaten zu kopieren – Republik This is why Proton is fighting this proposal.
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