That in short, the A&A bill is about breaking end-to-end encryption, which Fastmail has never had anything to do with. It’s scary-sounding legislation, and I reckon it’s misguided at best, but it honestly doesn’t affect all that many businesses [note I’m saying businesses rather than people; many affected businesses will be among the largest ones, serving consumers], because end-to-end encryption of communications is uncommon, because it’s so frightfully inconvenient for all parties involved, because now the server is necessarily dumb and the client has to do a lot more work, and things like searching are typically just altogether broken because you’ll need the full index on the client to do a search.
(And specifically of the domain of email, I wouldn’t trust first-party encryption; if you care about governments accessing your data, first-party encryption such as ProtonMail offers is almost equivalent to no encryption if you can’t verify the code that is running, since that party may be compelled to backdoor the code to steal your password. This is one of the many reasons that Fastmail has never implemented PGP, ⅌ https://fastmail.blog/2016/12/10/why-we-dont-offer-pgp/.)
That in short, the A&A bill is about breaking end-to-end encryption, which Fastmail has never had anything to do with. It’s scary-sounding legislation, and I reckon it’s misguided at best, but it honestly doesn’t affect all that many businesses [note I’m saying businesses rather than people; many affected businesses will be among the largest ones, serving consumers], because end-to-end encryption of communications is uncommon, because it’s so frightfully inconvenient for all parties involved, because now the server is necessarily dumb and the client has to do a lot more work, and things like searching are typically just altogether broken because you’ll need the full index on the client to do a search.
(And specifically of the domain of email, I wouldn’t trust first-party encryption; if you care about governments accessing your data, first-party encryption such as ProtonMail offers is almost equivalent to no encryption if you can’t verify the code that is running, since that party may be compelled to backdoor the code to steal your password. This is one of the many reasons that Fastmail has never implemented PGP, ⅌ https://fastmail.blog/2016/12/10/why-we-dont-offer-pgp/.)