They dont “cooperate with governments”, they follow the laws they legally have to. All the cases I can think of where they gave info to a government with a legal order to do so, they gave information that has to be logged in order for the system to work and the subjects themselves used poor opsec eg: their real names for accounts and recovery emails…

Some privacy extremists have unrealistic expectations when they sign up to these things without fully understanding how it works and then blame the provider for something they were completely transparent about from the beginning.

No problem!

We did the same thing, wrote out a small, basic set of guidelines outlining why we didnt want anything on social media or big tech clouds among a few other things.

Most family downloaded signal straight away which was a bonus to be able to possibly fuck off messenger in the future.

As long as you make it as easy as possible (within reason, dont bend over backwards if someone doesnt want to comply for no good reason) for others within your boundaries then it will end up being mostly painless.

Also congratz on becoming soon to be new parents! Sleep as much as possible now! Haha… Aha… Ha…

Something you need to consider even before all this, is what other people will do with the photos once they have them.

I’ve been through a similar situation recently and had to lay out ground rules for what people were allowed to do with the photos and where they could be saved. I made the condition that if they wanted to see photos I would only send them through signal. Past that point you just need to trust that grandma who downloads the image to her iphone doesnt have iCloud enabled by default and boom your childs image is now in the hands of apple. (Or any other auto backup cloud host)

Be prepared for some outright childish behaviour from people you thought were adults when you tell them they cant take their own photos unless they show you they dont have auto sync to iCloud enabled…

The only way to truly keep your kids image out of the cloud is to never let anyone else have possession of it to begin with unfortunately.

From reading that article it looks like they were only using and able to log the IP address when the person logged in to their protonmail account specifically - not VPN.

They even state that VPNs can not be forced to log under the same legal order and are treated differently so in this case it seems the activists were not using the VPN while accessing their emails.

Although I dont agree with even the logging of the email IP, it appears like the user shot themselves in the foot like that other case where someone used their real name in the username and that obviosly has to be logged in some way.