TheFool

Yeah, okay, fair point. I guess it depends on the use case. For general communication, you’re absolutely right, but in the article, it said he was a climate activist, and I imagine I‘d rather use a separate anonymous email address to organise and demonstrate than an account linked to my phone number and through that to my identity.

Fair point, and it seems like I was wrong about the phone numbers in France. If you can use an anonymous prepaid phone number, it makes sense to use Signal + TOR. But in many European countries, even though Signal is legal, you have to provide your legal ID to get a phone number, so your Signal account is never anonymous, as opposed to a free Proton Mail address, which you can create without providing any information.

Not generally but since in this case they had to record and hand over the IPs used to access the Proton Mail account, if he had used TOR they couldn’t have handed over anything useful

Proton was legally forced to record IPs for this account (as per the linked article). Theoretically that could happen to Signal just as well if the laws allow it in their jurisdiction. There was nothing in the article about message content or metadata being handed over to authorities.

As far as I know in France you can‘t have an anonymous phone number so technically using TOR and Proton Mail you can achieve a higher level of privacy than with Signal