PSA: Infomaniak supports mass surveillance, calling for legal change to end online anonymity + mandatory metadata retention

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I just read this bombshell article on Tom’s Guide:

As a French speaker, I went to verify the TV and radio interviews mentioned in Tom’s Guide and it’s truly shocking. Everyone should immediately dump Infomaniak.

Here are some quotes from Infomaniak’s spokesperson, on Swiss national TV and Radio:

“Today’s Internet is not yesterday’s Internet, and we still have companies offering free services that enable people to be completely anonymous, to encrypt their content and to be completely opaque when it comes to the law. This poses a problem, and it’s only right that the Swiss justice department should do its job.”

“Anonymity is a no-no, because if there’s a legal problem, we can’t do the job…. We’re not talking about accessing the contents of emails, but tracking exchanges, just to be able to track people down, …it’s necessary.”

“We speak about metadata, it doesn’t threaten encryption, and what the revision of the law is asking for is simply to make it impossible to create a completely anonymous identity to do unlawful activities that could not be prosecuted. Somehow, in “real life”, we would not accept this: as evidence, when we create a phone number with a SIM card, it is mandatory to provide an ID card and it’s exactly for the same reason.”

Infomaniak, a company that positions itself as “ethical”, and one who built a brand based on user security and privacy, is now publicly supporting the Swiss government’s move to force VPN and email providers to log user data and collect PII. I think the quotes speak for themselves, but TLDR they are explicitly calling for:

  • Mandatory metadata retention
  • A blanket ban on anonymity online
  • Making free & encrypted services subservient to the Swiss justice department

This is completely disqualifying, and it’s important to spread the word, because there are posts where Infomaniak is recommended as a good option for activists and privacy sensitive people.

IMO they should never be recommended because unlike other service providers talked about here (i.e. Proton), they don’t use end-to-end encryption, so they have access to all of your data, and now it seems they are apparently eager to hand it over to the government.

Just to clarify how insane this is, the legal change they want to see in Switzerland would:

  • Require MANDATORY retention of all metadata & last connection info.
  • Outright ban no-logs VPNs
  • Require ID for all cloud services when registering
  • Require companies to automatically hand over data to the govt. with no chance to appeal, no court order needed.

You can read more in-depth on this topic itself here (it’s in Swiss German but you can translate): https://www.republik.ch/2025/05/07/die-schweiz-ist-drauf-und-dran-autoritaere-ueberwachungsstaaten-zu-kopieren

Infomaniak is, in effect, calling for a police state and elimination of all personal privacy rights online. Outrageous.

As the TG article suggests, Proton & others are on the right side of this and fighting the proposal Infomaniak supports.

They are resisting, have rejected the proposal, and stated that they will leave Switzerland if this passes: Surveillance: le géant des mails cryptés Proton prêt à quitter Genève | Tribune de Genève

I think it is clear who can be trusted and who cannot be trusted. Looking forward to your thoughts on this also, especially if anyone here is using the kSuite.

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Terrifying. Thanks for sharing to the forum and offering your insights from the French-language articles.

How widespread is infomaniak anyways? Are their user-facing services, such as K Mail and KSuite, even worth discussion at the first place? I haven’t heard of them before but curious to hear your thoughts on their products.

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I’m surprised you haven’t heard of them – they do get mentioned on here from time to time, and some forum members have recommended them, despite not being E2EE. Their suite is a lot more ‘complete’ I’d say, especially thanks to kMeet/kChat. Still, I would say lately they have been benefiting a lot on the Mail and Cloud Storage front when it comes to user-facing products, which is especially obvious when you lurk mainstream subreddits or even recently growing ones like deGoogle.

I particularly find it mindblowing that a Swiss company would go against the grain of so many of their competitors, like Threema/Proton, and so on, when the signals have been so loud that people don’t want this, and the companies themselves don’t want it either.

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It’s appalling how he doesn’t understand that a backdoor is for everyone and not only for the good guy. They say that “swiss and european citizens don’t want to bear responsibility for justice issues, such as the r*pe of a girl, because [investigators] cannot track the network”.

Yet, he also claims that should China ask for information to Swiss trough Interpol, infomaniak would then protect users that are climate, humanitarian or democratic activists.

So you think that because you are advocating for the law now, swiss courts would say “Oh, this request for information on an activist is to infomaniak, so we will go soft on them”? No, you will have to comply, and with all the metadata you will have to store, many info will be known of those activists.

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Naive all around :person_facepalming:

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They’re basically saying anonymity are for criminals. Yep people should dump them and shouldn’t be recommending them for just that absurd notion alone.

Personally i used to thought they’re an okay-ish provider. Obviously not on par with proton or tuta since theres no e2e but also not as obvious horrible as google or microsoft. Their storage offerings are dirt cheap, useable for clientside manual encryption via cryptomator and such. Their privacy policy while mentioned they do collect PII are understandable considering they’re a domain registrar bound with icann contract for kyc-ing domain registrant but this call of support mandatory metadata retention is really bad faith. Way to shoot yourself in the foot distancing yourself from your original userbase target with the self proclaimed “ethical”. Disgusting people.

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There was a comment on Linkedin of someone saying he felt betrayed for recommending infoManiak to his customers

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