One of the most important developments is the introduction of premium plans. It was developed by a team of research students from MIT and Harvard, headed by Harvard PhD candidate and CERN researcher Andy Yen, and was initially crowdfunded by a wildly successful IndieGoGo campaign. However, Andy Yen's claims that he would rather leave Switzerland than comply with the BÜPF are certainly coming back to haunt him. It's worth noting that ProtonVPN is not affected by the same legislation, and as such, is unaffected by the invasive surveillance laws that bind ProtonMail. This is absolutely shattering for the company's reputation, but it was forced to comply with Swiss legislation, handing over date of account creation information. And again following a request to Swiss authorities from Europol in relation to an Extinction Rebellion activist under investigation.

ProtonMail has recently come under fire for handing over user information to Swiss authorities not once, but twice! First, after someone used multiple ProtonMail accounts to send death threats to well-known immunologist Anthony Fauci. In the near future, the team will focus on bringing the zero-access contact manager feature to the mobile apps, too currently, it's enabled only in the web version of the service.Handing user information over to Swiss authorities This new feature will enable ProtonMail users to communicate with other people that may not use ProtonMail, but another service with PGP encryption, in a more secure way.

Because the contact fields can now be digitally signed, that means attackers can’t change a contact’s PGP public key, either. For instance, the contact manager will be expanded to store PGP public keys securely. ProtonMail said that the newly announced changes also pave the way for other security enhancements in 2018.

The signing of the contacts is done with your private key, and the integrity of the contacts’ information is checked every time you access it. The contact fields are encrypted with your contact’s public key and can be decrypted only with your own corresponding private key. This also means ProtonMail doesn’t have access to the private key. The key is generated as a derivative of the user’s password, to which ProtonMail also doesn’t have access. ProtonMail generates a new private/public key pair in the user’s browser that is used exclusively for contact signing.

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