We at Tutanota Would Never Accept a Directive Like the One Presented to Yahoo.

2016-10-05
It is still unbelievable to us that Yahoo gave access to all their email accounts to US authorities. This recent publication of years and years of online surveillance shows again how easy it is to monitor everybody - when the data is not being encrypted. This is why Tutanota encrypts all mailboxes by default.

We believe in our right to privacy.

We believe that the right to privacy is one of our fundamental Human Rights. For that matter we have built a new email service that integrates encryption into its system so that no one - not even our administrators - can access your private communication. On top of this we have a transparency report that is true to the facts - unlike Yahoo's transparency report. In light of these changes there has never been a better time to delete your Yahoo account.

We have never received a request to give access to all mailboxes

And as Edward Snowden asked for it, we can state that we have never received a request similar to the one Yahoo has received and that if we were to receive one, we would oppose it in court.

In addition we can state that we simply cannot give access to email content because all mailboxes are encrypted with the help of the user's password. We only store encrypted data on our servers, and only the user can decrypt their emails when they access their accounts locally on their device.

Germany protects user's rights to privacy

It is also very unlikely that we would receive a similar request as Germany has very strict laws on user privacy protection and bulk monitoring is simply out of the question. Even when Germany introduced data retention last year, email was explicitly exempted from this law to protect people's right to privacy.

We recommend everyone to switch immediately to our encrypted mailbox. This is the only way you can be sure that no one is scanning your emails on the server.

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