Why ProtonMail is more secure than Gmail
Threat model, threat model, threat model.<p>There are some people for whom &quot;The government is literally after me, personally&quot; is a valid threat model. There are some people for whom &quot;Google employees with privileged access to Gmail are conspiring to be after me, personally&quot; (one assumes there&#x27;s a two-person rule for access to individual inboxes or deploying code that scans inboxes) is also a valid threat model.<p>However, those people should consider that the government will be willing to use either software 0-days or algorithmic 0-days to attack them (see e.g. Stuxnet taking out Iran&#x27;s nuclear program using a previously unknown method of generating SHA-1 collisions, that looked kind of like how the academic community knew to generate collisions but with a different fingerprint), in the government case. Or that <i>any interaction with anyone who uses Google</i> must be avoided, in the Google case. See e.g. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;mako.cc&#x2F;copyrighteous&#x2F;google-has-most-of-my-email-because-it-has-all-of-yours" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;mako.cc&#x2F;copyrighteous&#x2F;google-has-most-of-my-email-be...</a><p>For normal people (which includes me and probably everyone else commenting here)? Google seems at least as likely, probably a tiny bit more, to protect me from threats like &quot;A personal relationship has gone bad and someone who isn&#x27;t a government and isn&#x27;t Google is trying to impersonate be me&quot; or &quot;I don&#x27;t want to lose access to my email&quot; (remember that availability is a part of security!).