- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.world
Summary
Proton Mail, known for its privacy-first email services, faced backlash after CEO Andy Yen praised the Republican Party and its antitrust stance.
The company initially posted and deleted a statement supporting Yen’s comments, later claiming an “internal miscommunication” and reiterating its political neutrality.
Critics question Proton’s impartiality, particularly as it cooperates with Swiss authorities on legal data requests.
Privacy advocates warn that political alignments could undermine trust, especially for Proton’s users—journalists and activists wary of government surveillance under administrations like Trump’s.
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My renewal of proton VPN is entirely dependent on who the ceo is when it’s time for me to renew.
If fuckface is still there, I’ll move on.
I’m fickle that way.
I strongly recommend Mullvad. Exceptional performance, wireguard support and if you’re really paranoid about anonymity you can literally send them money via post.
The number of places I can do business with is dropping drastically. I’m going to have to start making my own clothes in the near future.
Same at this point. I just paid for the year in November.
Any good alternatives for ProtonVPN when visiting China? ProtonShield looks pretty promising and with 10 devices for 9,99€ a month my whole family (8 people) would get it for our trip
nice advertisement.
Maybe just don’t worry about connecting home and getting mail / news while you’re vacationing.
Shadowsocks is free and what most people there use.
Search engine: what Vpn’s work in china 2025
There’s no limit of reputable alternatives.
And today I got an email saying they’re donating a million dollars to support non-profits for privacy and freedom. Timing, timing, timing.
They do that every year. The 2024 was the 7th edition.
I was considering signing up, any alternatives?
I’m curious, too. It was the only decent free vpn.
For VPN there’s mullvad, for email there’s posteo, for storage I recommend signing up with disroot, for password storage I’d recommend KeePass or BitWarden/VaultWarden depending on your threat models and needs
The real pain is going to be having those services split up so much.
Proton was really convenient for packaging those in a really convenient way.
Guess there’s a business opportunity here?
Some would say that is actually a pro, not a con. You don’t want your entire digital life tied to the whims of a single corporation. Fragmentation trades a bit of inconvenience for a ton more privacy and control over your digital presence.
Yes, it’s a pro in my opinion, don’t want all my eggs in one basket so to speak. And of course the providers want you to do just that, to use them for everything - mail, vpn, storage, passwords, aliases, docs, digital wallets (yeah proton has one now too!) - because that makes it very difficult to leave their service if their CEO turns out to be a Nazi or if you just find a better offering.
For a bundle I’d probably say look at disroot.org
FYI, if anyone is interested in VPN for torrenting, apparently Mullvad’s VPN is no longer good for that. Something to do with port forwarding. Out of the three that are recommended on https://www.privacyguides.org/en/vpn/ (IVPN, Mullvad, Proton), only Proton apparently still supports that.
You don’t need port-forwading for torrenting. It’s more like a nice-to-have. Mullvad works fine without it, so don’t let that stop you if you’re on the fence.
Yeah, it’s why I went with Proton over other options. :/
deleted by creator
I’ve tried Proton mail and couldn’t get comfortable with their UI. Have been on Fastmail for two years now and it’s been excellent.
I tried proton and I couldn’t get into using their service since it kept asking for personal information. I ended up not using it.
I’m back with Fastmail too, after having quit to go with Proton a while back. I never ran into a single email where the recipient was encrypted, so I’ve come to see the whole encrypted email shtick as mostly marketing.
I went with mailbox.org for mail, contacts, calendar. Keepass+syncthing for passwords. Still looking for VPN and file storage. I’ve been trying out nextcloud but there is a learning curve to host your own.
Mullvad is great for vpn.
How are mailbox and fastmail privacy-wise? Where are they located? Are they friendly to share stuff to random authorities?
Good news for them, I’m “financially neutral”
Yep, I moved to tuta the day Andy took to Reddit to be a dipshit. The only way I’d go back is if he resigned. At the very least Andy Yen has shown extremely poor judgement and I do not trust Proton under his leadership.
As a side note, If anyone’s looking for a VPN alternative, I highly recommend Mullvad.
Same. It’s little more difficult to say goodbye to simplelogin when my partner and I have like 150+ aliases and the subdomain use is SO convenient. Trying to eventually move the family to Addy.IO
I just signed up for the cheapest paid Addy plan and so far I’m very impressed, especially since it seems to be a one-man show. The docs are good which has been a huge help, and the user dashboard website is easy to grok.
What are the political alignments of the Tuta CEO?
He didn’t say that though, he thinks Republicans are the party more likely to fight for “small tech” against big tech in the antitrust space. You can still consider this bad judgment but it’s purely an opinion that he motivated from his point of view with a few data points.
Digital rights are an indirect benefit that may derive for breaking big tech monopolies, but nothing was mentioned.
What are your thoughts on Tuta so far?
Been using the free tier of Tuta for years now with zero issues. The only thing is they delete your account after 6 months of not logging in (the timer resets every time you log in). Pretty sure that only applies to the free tier, though.
Awesome. Thanks for the insight!
If your goal is basic mail, with standard features, Tuta is great. The free option is more than enough for an anonymous email.
If you want to pay a little you can move your domain over and get a bunch more features.
If you appreciate a simple interface, Tuta will be perfect. They have apps for desktops and phones as well as web.
I appreciate the response!
Been running my own domain from Tuta for about a year now. Had no issues so far.
Commenting so I can come back to this because hell if I’m going to remember to check it if I just save the comment.
Thank you for your assistance on the matter.
It seems like a good alternative but I honestly haven’t used it enough over the last two weeks to feel comfortable recommending it to people yet. Sorry I can’t be more helpful, but there’s a free tier so there’s no downside in giving Tuta a shot for a bit.
Thank you for the response. I’ll probably give it a try since my needs are simple
Correction; the CEO posted a rather tone deaf message. while this is incredibly dumb, it should be little reason to burn the company to the ground
Having said that, people should start looking at email again how it was designed to be: have thousands of open providers instead of the tiny fee enormous ones we got now
We owe no fealty to any company.
I have my subscription for another 6 months. If Andy is still in a leadership role by then, I’ll probably cancel. I stopped ignoring red flags in my 20s. I’m not going back now.
You seem to be downplaying it and skipping the part where the companies initial official response strongly backed the personal view he posted and was very nakedly partisan. They later retracted and deleted that official response and had Andy go and argue on Reddit direct. It was a mixed bag… maybe not worth deleting your account over but it didn’t look great and looks worse every day Trump is in office.
Logic is sadly not a concept familiar to people on Lemmy. If you don’t agree that this literally makes Proton a nazi company - then why are you even here?
gonna quickly post here, since I don’t know quite where else would be good, but I noticed sometime last year that the website, https://standardnotes.com/ (a product owned by proton) seems to use a massive amount of AI generated imagery.
also: I thought I was a fool for not getting lifetime visionary when I could, now a little less so :)
Standard Notes owned by Proton? I didn’t know it lol
I only found out since I used standard notes before the ownership thing, I suppose I’m gonna have to look for a syncing note taking service again.
Have you considered self hosting a syncing note taking service?
https://awesome-selfhosted.net/tags/note-taking--editors.html
it’s worth some consideration I suppose. so long as it’s not too resource intensive, it could be good to spin it up on my vps space
Provided you’re not in need of fully fledged powerpoints, it would be fine to run them w/ little to no resources allocated to it. It just depends on your use-case, I suggest doing a backup of some sort and try out the various options. Unless you’re setup allows you to freely try them all out in which case go nuts
I suppose I’ll look for a decent service (maybe with spreadsheet support this time) and try to spin something up next week
Ah in that case you may want to look into paperless-ngx in the Document Management section:
https://awesome-selfhosted.net/tags/document-management.html
I don’t actually dislike ai imagery, I think it can produce interesting imagery. However, I must concede that is an excessive use of boilerplate bog-standard AI imagery.
I mostly agree, I think it’s good for individuals and small businesses who just need some free copyright-free (though arguably this is debatable) graphics for things. It’s not like the have the time/money to do it all themselves or get it commissioned.
But I don’t like it when >=medium businesses use it to cut costs or when it’s used for something that is directly meant to make money (like an advert or the core of a piece of content your consuming)
I use it a lot when I’m writing my notes (ie joplin/obsidian), I’ll use flux or stable diffusion for a few iterations until I can create an image that Is consistent with what I’m writing.
It can be really convenient to be able to recognize an image as you’re browsing through notes that are otherwise just filled with code or maybe a recount of the day.
I’m sure most consumers consider excessive use of generative AI to be in bad form. It certainly doesn’t exude professionalism.
I think at this point in the USA it’s very clear:
If you’re “politically neutral”, you’re Republican.
I (and very many others) may not agree with the democrats, but since we only got two parties there, it’s damage-control. And any sane person (that would like to have a non-dystopian future) votes against Trump…
Neutrality only ever helps the aggressors. Hitlers Europe strategy was predicated on the Swiss doing nothing in response to the annexation of Austria and occupation of France.
Ok Trumper.
they’re Swiss
Yes, I know, I’m also not from the USA from a “neutral” state (Austria)…
Actually, especially if you’re European, even the democrats are more right-leaning, i.e. comparable with the conservative parties here.
No one is actually politically neutral…
It’s bad but still so much better than google.
Yeah this is a masks off moment for them and people better be paying attention!
I cancelled my subscription and moved to tuta and mailbox.org in a couple of hours.
I don’t consider this a nothingburger and I didn’t like how it played out.
Dollar vote.
With this president flattery will get you everything. If you don’t publicly praise him he will come for you and your users.
I am not saying that I love the endorsement, I do understand it.
He literally had to say nothing at all lol
Proton is based in Switzerland. If anything, I get the message that the only services that are Trump-proof are based in China or France, because everybody else has lost their fucking mind.
Services in China may be Trump-proof, but they’re sure as shit not CCP-proof.
They are not acting like a bunch of unpredictable religious lunatics tho. So as long as I don’t mention Tianammen Square I should be 👍
But he has absolutely no reason to do so. That’s like VPNs bowing to Trump.
The lack of risk, especially when the average Proton user is actively looking for privacy/security from tech companies who bow to government, makes this endorsement even more sinister than it should be.
The only way to get rid of those bastards is to never comply with any pressure they bring to bear, short of literally pointing a gun at you. Kissing the ring makes you one of the enablers.
I can see this for like Apple or Google, but…
Proton?
What beef could Trump and conservative influencers possibly have with it? And even if they did, it’s not even an American company, it’s Swiss.
I really don’t understand why smart people put their eggs in the proton basket.
Big (shady) money rule Switzerland. A Swiss server or company isn’t safer or more trustworthy. Quite the opposite.
Thank you! I was also very confused how all these privacy-conscious people warned against big corporations, and then starting using a product… By a big corporation. Just because they say they’re privacy conscious and nice and safe and whatever doesn’t mean it’s true. I mean, they might be substantially better, but there’s no proof of that. Every company always makes promises, at first. I guess people really like to believe in an underdog.
It’s like if someone warned you against eating sweets because they’re unhealthy, but then pulls out their own bag of sweets saying “oh no, these sweets are fine because the company that makes them promised they’re healthy”.
They’re not big. 500 people at a communications company that develops their own stuff is relatively tiny.
Team looks great. 14 employees in 2020, I bet they’re honestly serious about security
Either due to spectrum or other, I can’t interpret this without questioning if it’s sarcasm 😆
Straight up honest. I can argue with 14 people running a 2 million-user service and openly talking about the team on their page.
I like it more if that top tier was about $5, but the probably lack the scale to decrease cost.
Yep and if you look at some corrupt sports bosses like Sepp Blatter, Gianni Infantino and Rene Fasel, all are Swiss.
Aside from the political stuff, I’m also concerned about proton from a technological standpoint. You can’t use a standard mail client with proton, you have to use their own. So, if they wanted to, they could push out a single malicious update which would render all of the end-to-end encryption stuff pointless. You could argue that using Thunderbird + GPG + Gmail is more secure/private.
You can if you use the bridge, which is not perfect but basically does the GPG encryption/decryption for you and exposes IMAP etc. (I think you can also do your own PGP encryption on top, not sure).
The supply chain issue you discuss is the same with any tool, with the exception that with proton you have an automated update system (I.e. every time the page loads js code), while with more traditional tooling you upgrade based on your choice (more or less). You are likely not checking the code in either case, but a malicious update could backdoor or bypass your encryption either way. Technically you can build the proton client yourself but anyway, this is just theoretical stuff, nobody does that.
Gmail + GPG is anyway worse, first of all from a UX perspective, where every device needs to be managed separately (GPG keys need to be available, you need to manage them, managing keys and keeping them secure is hard). Second, you will use GPG only with selected people of whom you have the key. With proton you will use it automatically for all Proton users at the very least and all proton users can use it with you automatically too.
Then there is the problem with metadata. They cannot be encrypted of course, and with gmail you are 100% sure they are using them to profile you and mine whatever data can be mined (e.g., who you talk to), while with proton you can reasonably be confident they don’t.
You can’t use a standard mail client with proton, you have to use their own.
Part of the reason is that the protocol that’s uses for retrieving emails (IMAP) is pretty old and doesn’t support end-to-end encryption. JMAP is supposed to be a modern replacement, but it’s not widespread yet, and also intentionally doesn’t support E2EE.
E2EE is hard, for example searching has to be done client side rather than having a search index on the server side (since the server is not able to decrypt the data to index it). I haven’t tried Proton but I’m curious as to how they solve this… I guess they’d sync the entire mailbox and index it locally, like what (non-mobile) Thunderbird does.
I really question the value of E2EE for emails, though. Communication between servers (e.g. someone on Gmail sending an email to a Proton user) uses TLS but is not, and will likely never be, end-to-end encrypted. Emails you send to other providers are also not likely to be encrypted on the other provider’s end.
What’s the alternative in your opinion? Google, or something else, and why?
Tbh it seems like there are no good alternatives to protonmail. You just have to host your own
Tuta has been good for me.
I just set up a bunch of purelymail addresses on a couple domains I own. I bought into proton for 2 years just a couple months ago. So I’ll transition away slowly.
Excluding Switzerland from the equation, most in the US don’t have + or - for Switzerland unless it’s banking.
You can never trust any company to put your needs first. A good moral company has at least its founders, private funders, employees, and vendors to look after before they worry about your wants and needs.
Proton was kinda small. 500 employees for a communications company isn’t bad.
Good start.
Proton made a name for itself. WE ARE PRIVACY FIRST and they mostly delivered on that in technical capabilities.
So far, so good.
Then they doxed someone’s IP (french?) due to a remote government order.
Not great, but anyone would do that. There have to be limits. That said, they now clearly play ball with governments.
All the other providers would do the same. They’re now on par with most, but less likely to sell all my data down the river. But my needs are to keep my secrets state secret level. (or so I think)
Then he crawls up Trumps ass.
Now, I’m doing nothing illegal. Nothing immoral. Nothing questionable by the previous administrations standards, but what happens If I start to protest? If I subscribe to democratic news sources, is this jackass going to train an AI on my and hand my name address and phone number to the neo facists running my country now?
We put our eggs wherever we think they can best be served conveniently and for the best price.
You can also choose to not put your eggs anywhere. You can secure your email but not sending any.
we were trying to choose price+convenience+security.
knock one of those legs out, it’s not a table anymore.
This comment needs more upvotes inmho. This is exactly right. It’s how I followed this history myself. They built on Privacy first. Now there are red flags which were not clear before.
On the hacker news thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42837181
They discuss the topic and there is only a single reply from ProtonPrivacy, saying it’s miscommunication and blah blah.
It was not enough to dispel my sense of unease and concern and a single comment isn’t exactly ‘fighting to set the record straight’.
My 2¢.
They’ve done a lot of damage control. They were on Reddit too, They spin it that the pick he made was actually a reasonable pick, (1/50 even if they’re right on this one and I don’t think they are) but they don’t address that he went on to Twitter and tagged Trump to try to gain favor.
One can’t reach out to the man trying to dismantle democracy and say “hey buddy, you’re doing great! Can I get in on some of that?” and still try to claim centrist.
Yeah Proton already burned that bridge. “Politically Neutral” is no longer an option for them.
When I first saw the headline, I thought it sounded like one of those stories about how many Nazis are at the table or at the bar.
When you exist in a 2-party system, and one of those parties are mask-off fascists, and people suspect you of supporting them, saying you’re neutral isn’t a good look.
