TL;DR, Proton was demanded to hand over the information that they had on someone to the Spanish authorities. They complied and gave them all the information they had: a recovery email address.
If you have evidence of your claims, please share them, as Proton is a widely used email, but you can’t make these sorts of claims without evidence.
because: proton advertises their mail service like crazy, so it’s easy to tell something sketchy is going on
I’ve never seen a Proton advert. Regardless, that is not evidence.
Something that would count as evidence is perhaps this article that proves that they literally did not have access to the emails: https://protos.com/protonmail-hands-info-to-government-but-says-its-not-google/
TL;DR, Proton was demanded to hand over the information that they had on someone to the Spanish authorities. They complied and gave them all the information they had: a recovery email address.
If you have evidence of your claims, please share them, as Proton is a widely used email, but you can’t make these sorts of claims without evidence.