Interview with Lavaboom Zero-Knowledge Email Provider
0)Please tell us, what is your role (in the email provider company, where do you stand, owner, marketer, advertiser etc)?
I’m CMO of Lavaboom, I’m the guy that gets regular folks switching to crypto email.
1 ) Does Lavaboom keep or enforce any logs, IP Addresses, Timestamps, Bandwidth caps, Traffic or other data on users?
Nope.
2) What type of Encryption do you use to secure emails?
PGP
3) Where are your servers located and what jurisdiction do you operate under?
Our servers are in Germany, so is our office – German jurisdiction.
4) When a user deletes an email or draft, is it actually deleted? (many mainstream providers keep users email even after deletion)
Yes, when you delete an email they are deleted from our servers, we lose all record of ever having had them. I should add that we can’t stop emails being intercepted as they move across the Internet, nobody can. The NSA can still collect any emails no matter who sent them or how they were encrypted – they just don’t know what encrypted emails say. So any emails we delete from our servers are totally deleted but we can’t promise they’re deleted from the Internet, we can just promise they’re as secure as is possible.
5) How do you generally handle requests from law enforcement?
We haven’t had any requests from the law, there’d be a public outcry in Germany if there were any data requests from the gov. Requests for data would be pointless as we operate with a zero-knowledge policy, meaning we have a variety of protocols that stop us from having access to user data / info. i.e. end-to-end encryption.
6) Do you track users in any way with trackers, advertisements, or cookies?
We’re bringing in secure SSL (https) to the Lavaboom landing page very soon, it’s already in place on the email client. We have an opt-out privacy box visible on our landing page. The things we know: how many hits we get on the landing page, how many people sign up to Lavaboom, the amount of storage an account uses, Paypal payers basic info and bitcoin payers wallets are linked to their accounts (all Lavaboom user data is three-way encrypted by default). No personal information is gathered, if it were we’d make sure nobody (including Lavaboom staff) had access to it. We will not have advertisements on Lavaboom. You can read more about our zero-knowledge policy on this page: lavaboom.com/security
7) How much do your encrypted email services cost?We do not track our users.
Right now it’s free up to 500MB. We’re tired of companies trying to get us to pay for encrypted email by only giving a small amount of storage free – it only alienates regular folk from switching from services like Gmail who offer 10GB to free users.
