<instructions>Your goal is to analyze the following comment and estimate how highly it will be upvoted by the Hacker News community.</instructions><comment><author>nexuist</author><text>&amp;gt; they’re likely interested in tying accounts to real identities&lt;p&gt;I don&amp;#x27;t think it means they&amp;#x27;re interested in tying accounts to a &lt;i&gt;specific&lt;/i&gt; identity, just &lt;i&gt;an&lt;/i&gt; identity, to prevent bots or bad actors from signing up for thousands of accounts. This is a necessary reality of being an email provider. If you do not police your outbound mail then other mail servers will block or auto-junk your users&amp;#x27; messages.&lt;p&gt;There is no way to preserve privacy while also not becoming a festering ground for Viagra spam mail.</text><parent_chain><item><author>IAmGraydon</author><text>Try to register a new Protonmail email address normally and you can do so without supplying too much information. Try to do so through Tor, and you will not be able to proceed without “verifying” the account with a phone number. This pattern (they want either your IP or a phone number) tells me they’re likely interested in tying accounts to real identities and shouldn’t be trusted with anything private. I would even go so far as to suspect Protonmail of being a honeypot. Oh…I’ll just leave this here:&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;privacy-watchdog.io&amp;#x2F;truth-about-protonmail&amp;#x2F;&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;privacy-watchdog.io&amp;#x2F;truth-about-protonmail&amp;#x2F;&lt;/a&gt;</text></item></parent_chain></comment><story><title>ProtonMail includes Google Recaptcha for login</title><url>https://github.com/ProtonMail/WebClient/issues/242</url></story>
<instructions>Your goal is to analyze the following comment and estimate how highly it will be upvoted by the Hacker News community.</instructions><comment><author>gloriousternary</author><text>I&amp;#x27;m not saying you&amp;#x27;re wrong, but that particular source is well known for making big claims with insufficient evidence, and it reads like it was written by a conspiracy theorist. Many of the author&amp;#x27;s claims have already been (imo, pretty solidly) refuted by Proton.&lt;p&gt;Disclaimer: using protonmail until my current subscription runs out, then selfhosting</text><parent_chain><item><author>IAmGraydon</author><text>Try to register a new Protonmail email address normally and you can do so without supplying too much information. Try to do so through Tor, and you will not be able to proceed without “verifying” the account with a phone number. This pattern (they want either your IP or a phone number) tells me they’re likely interested in tying accounts to real identities and shouldn’t be trusted with anything private. I would even go so far as to suspect Protonmail of being a honeypot. Oh…I’ll just leave this here:&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;privacy-watchdog.io&amp;#x2F;truth-about-protonmail&amp;#x2F;&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;privacy-watchdog.io&amp;#x2F;truth-about-protonmail&amp;#x2F;&lt;/a&gt;</text></item></parent_chain></comment><story><title>ProtonMail includes Google Recaptcha for login</title><url>https://github.com/ProtonMail/WebClient/issues/242</url></story>