Wild that it says this on their site:

>Sign up with no phone number: Get a private email account without handing over more personal data than necessary, making it harder for advertisers, data brokers, and other services to track you online.

I guess it doesn't mention law enforcement so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I'm not sure what you were expecting here. If you have data and the police shows up with a warrant, you can't just tell them "nah we don't feel like it".

The article explains that the account was identified based on a credit card payment for a paid account, which does not invalidate the statement in question IMO. Perhaps we differ on the definition of "private" or something else, but unless all parties are using proton, email is inherently insecure and somebody can/will have a record of your communication regardless.

They could have used a VPN to connect to Proton and paid for their account with bitcoin or cash and then law enforcement would have had a very tough time. Instead, they paid with a method connected to their identity. Of course Proton handed it over when law enforcement came knocking.

If you don't want info being given to law enforcement by third parties, your best bet is to make it so that nobody else has access to it in the first place. You might get away with third parties that are in a jurisdiction unfriendly to wherever you live. Definitely don't hand over your info to a company in fricken' Switzerland and then be surprised when they comply with law enforcement requests for it.

When a SWAT team drops in nobody's gonna take a bullet for your emails.

This is disappointing. I would pay up to $10/month for an email provider who would go to jail for me.