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.