- 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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The sort of Swiss neutrality that doesn’t care whose teeth the gold is from.
Reason n1 why I never use Swiss services.
For me, the most-used Proton service after email is their calendar. What privacy-friendly calendar alternatives are there that you can recommend?
Both my new service candidates, mailbox.org and posteo, offer calendars. However, I’m in a holding pattern currently since they are German based. Fuckface is meddling in their elections now, which happen at the end of Feb. so I’m holding off to see how much ground the Afd gains.
Self-hosting Nextcloud with Calendar plugin…
Again privacy oriented companies that bend to demagogues and desperate profiteers cannot be trusted to handle sensitive data.
Switched from ProtonVPN to Mullvad and ProtonMail to Posteo. Wiped my ProtonDrive. I sleep pretty soundly at night.
I mean, if they are praising the orange cock, then whats to make you believe they actually deleted the data like you said, and dont have a backup somewhere.
mullvads good though, cheap and no issues with it.
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…
The thing is, he raises a lot of very accurate points about the Democratic party. Dems are captured by corporations; they’re unwilling to do what the people want, and what is in the best interests of the people, because that hurts their flow of money. And yes, tech companies are kissing Trump’s ass because he’s volatile enough that he could very well regulate them out of business if they aren’t sucking his dick. Additionally, prior to his MAGA phase, Vance does appear to have been much more populist in his approach to corporations; he was saying some of the right things, even if his social policies were trash.
he was saying some of the right things, even
Vance consistently talks about of both sides of his mouth. He will tell whomever he is talking to what they/their viewers want to hear.
His autobiography is verified fiction.
He’s not this kinda getting it but confused figure, that’s the costume he wears to try to gather votes from the left.
Vance really is such an obviously cynical piece of shit. Most politicians are of course, but he really takes the cake.
Most politicians are
I have higher expectations for those at the top. Lie to me, that’s fine and expected, but be consistent in that lie.
Lololololololololol, just pure lies and bullshit, not one fact, literally the opposite of reality
A lot of the dems are truly “captured” by corps. But that’s not what he said, he said the Republicans, who are 100% managed by corps, are better. That’s insane. And don’t start with Vance misinformation, he is owned and run by Peter Thiel.
Curious how so many people decided to ditch them and switch (vocally on Lemmy at least) and now they back petal/clarify/whatever. Turns out we have power and using it works. Sorry not sorry.
Im so sorry. I tried not to, but the pull was to strong. Ignore me please…
But…
The saying is “back pedal”, not “back petal”. “Back pedal” as in trying to pedal backwards on a bike. Not “back petal” as in trying to pick flowers at the back of a bush, maybe? Trying to not lie down on a bed of roses? Unsure.
I really don’t think there’s anything wrong with a respectful and well-intentioned correction.
I fixed that twice!
Fist Curse you autocorrect! FistOof. Kinda awkward, but…
*too
I'm so sorry but the Harvard Guid to Margin Spacing Standard is very off. Sorry.
I am currently entrenched in Google. Slowly digging my way out so I could transfer to proton. I was probably within about a month maybe two or pulling the trigger. Zero chance that happens now. I don’t like Google But I know what they’re going to do. If I’m going to put the effort into move that critical data it’s got to be with some place I can trust or I’m going to have to host it myself.
I’m researching the suggestions that people have made here: tuta, bitwarden, and mullvad.
BW is great Chefs Kiss $40 a year for 6 people, it’s a good product made by people who seem to care.
I’m using PIA, it’s not great, but i’m not doing great things nor and I doing them quickly. They’ll give you openssl certs and you can do programmatic crap AND have a dedicated port.
Tuta is pricey for what you get. 8/month/user for email/cal with reasonable storage, No office apps, i need to replace a LOT of google services. Still have a lot tied up in their auth/store. And honestly encrypted email (AAS) is mostly worthless. It’s not encrypted between them and office 365 or google and everyone is already reading those in transit. And Google/MS are already mining/selling the content. If you’re not talking tuta<->tuta you might as well be broadcasting it.
The $3 for the shared box seems like a slap in the face. You’re literally already paying them for service/storage.
You can host thousands of email users on a couple of modest boxes for a couple hundred a month.
Main downside of Mullvad is no port forwarding anymore
AirVPN is still great if you need port forwarding (e.g. for P2P services). Unfortunately they limit it to 5 ports for new accounts - used to be 20.
yap I’m exactly on the same boat. I am testing the waters with proton to leave google… and then I see this… Can’t find an alternative
Email:
Mailbox https://mailbox.org/en/
Posteo https://posteo.de/en
Startmail https://www.startmail.com/
Runbox https://runbox.com/
Cloud File Storage:
Filen https://filen.io/
Tresorit https://tresorit.com/
VPN:
Air VPN https://airvpn.org/
(sorry, didn’t have time to link more VPNs. I’m at work.)
Thank you, I have been looking at some of these but there are some there I haven’t checked. However, these all sound like complicated services to convince my family to switch. Something like Proton seemed perfect since it looked easy to use and I could easily explain that instead of “all your google services” here are (almost) all equivalent services on Proton here.
Personally going with option 2 on an old PC, learning a lot about docker lol
Personally going with option 2 on an old PC, learning a lot about docker lol
Have to be careful in planning, a lot of ISP’s block common ports needed to host dns/web/email
Getting DKIM and SPIF running locally has a bit of a learning curve.
The real pain is SMTP. Even if you set up everything perfectly, a lot of mail providers won’t accept SMTP traffic from a home IP.
I think my longterm plan is to just keep a free gmail and try like hell to never use it.
Was looking into https://mailcow.email/
Haven’t gone past the cursory look tho
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.
Sure hope their praises don’t include giving your data to their heroes
They would hand over your liver for an atta-boy and a small government contract.
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.
Yeah this is a masks off moment for them and people better be paying attention!
Okay, I feel like the part that people are skipping over is the “cooperating with authorities on legal data requests” part. No. As a privacy company; You DO NOT save and store ANY information apart from what is crucially and imminently necessary to run your service. Anything beyond that is a blatant conflict of interests and should not be trusted. Corruption and data sharing that CAN happen, WILL happen when it comes to data security based companies. Full stop.
Swiss company says “Nazi’s aren’t so bad.”
The more things change the more they stay the same.
When they say they’re “neutral” lets not forget what “neutral” meant during World War II. It meant making a fucking shitload of money at the expense of the rest of Europe.
Also, the geography of Switzerland is how they were able to convince Germany to not invade. A few US Nukes dropped from the sky make their geography a moot fucking point this time around.
That escalated quickly
So does their geography!
Not if @SnotFlickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone has their way.
Protrump Mail?
Just when I’m done migrating all my email shit to Proton, the CEO turns out to be a nazi. A classic.
I was at a similar crossroads when trying to de-google and pulled the trigger on Tuta Mail instead of Proton. Very happy with my decision now after reading this.
Same. Considered getting a domain for my email, but ended up just switching directly to the protonmail domain. Regretting that now.
Getting your own domain is the best thing you can do, regardless of provider - it means they can’t lock you in anymore.
But it’s awful for privacy, because everything is on one domain.
Email is already bad for privacy, and WHOIS protection solves most of the rest.
I gotta get a personal domain just for email, I don’t really want my personal life mixed in with our small business domain; both due to the nature of the products and because I don’t want to dox myself on either side of the work/life gulf. It’s a shame too, because I am actually proud of our garage business.
They’re relatively cheap. I’ve had one for years, though I don’t use it for email forwarding.
Weird shit also happens if send mail isn’t coming from a big provider :(
Yeah, I have no desire to try to host smtp. I’m thinking I could run my own imap and pull mail from various accounts and then just send mail through proton or tula or whoever. Someone already trusted.
I totally get that; I have three domains (work, personal, and one only for online services / aliases)
And the main reason I didn’t get a domain? Because I couldn’t come up with a good domain name. Naming stuff is always hard.
It is hard. I made up a name that sounds like it would be a webmail provider (it has “mail” in the name).
Surely the point of your own domain is to personalise it? Why would you go for something generic?
I use it with aliases for online signups, so the genericness is a feature, not a bug.
I did some more research and this is no joke:
Globalism is bad, being fair is bad, Europe-first, huh I wonder where we’ve heard this kind of rhetoric before.
Ar eyou saying Proton’s CEO is a Nazi? Far as I can tell he isn’t
Edit: your message is confusing which is why I ask
The EU was initially a good idea, but it got too involved in national politics (anyone remembers the banana guideline that reads like a meme?). I still think, the EU is fine and we should keep it, but it should be a defensive alliance first and foremost and not some fucking merger that is advocating for the rich. Sadly, it’s the rich that have the influence because, well, money and they are going to abuse it.
A call for isolation and autarky is a massive red flag and nothing good will ever happen after that, it always leads to exploitation and violence. The reason CEOs don’t like globalism is because it’s harder to create a monopoly on a global market than regional and capitalism strives for those because it hates competition.
I guess I’m lucky he came out with this shit just as I was about to migrate.
Only way to make sure your email isn’t run by a Nazi is to run it yourself.
Unless you’re a Nazi in which case FUCK OFF
Even for the technically literate, running a mail server is an ongoing nightmare. If you think it’s easy, you’re not doing it right.
Which is why I let my email be run by Nazis.
Seriously I wish I could quit them but it’s too damn hard.
Signed up last month because I had something to protect. Looking into Tuta. Anyone know a comparable free vpn?
I switched to Mullvad, works pretty well so far, for my needs.
I am aware of mullvad, and it sounds very good. However, I was looking for a free vpn, as I use vpn service very rarely.
Dagnabbit - I went all in on Proton as well. Why is it so hard to find an email provider that respects privacy and isn’t run by people with ‘problematic’ views (i.e. people who wish people like me didn’t exist)
While the comments were not welcome and left a sour taste, we are blowing it a bit out of proportion here.
You don’t get to decide how other people feel and respond to the issue.
They’re just expressing an opinion. Cool it.
I guess their username speaks for itself XD
Person A has an opinion, that is allowed. Person B has opinion, that is not allowed.
Lol I read this thread first, then went to the article and his comments were supportive of the potential for anti-trust legislation under the new administration? That makes him a Nazi? Wtf 😂
This is a huge reason why Lemmy faces an uphill battle in terms of growth, these absolutely batshit insane political takes pollute most threads about newsworthy events, which are in many ways the lifeblood of a content aggregator.
I can’t even count the number of times I’ve seen people say they tried Lemmy for a little while but eventually stopped because they got sick of every thread and community being constantly flooded with Nazi comparisons, accusations of genocide denial, and guillotine the rich stuff.
Like I get it, I really do, but maybe direct some of that righteous anger into some kind of real world activism instead of constantly bitching at anonymous strangers on Lemmy. These people are so outraged and the situation is so dire, and yet they continue to scroll online forums and farm upvotes? Have some ideological consistency ffs, if it’s a matter of life and death, go out there and do something to help.
Doomposting on Lemmy accomplishes nothing, and in fact continues to marginalize one of the few tools that we could potentially have to fight back. If Lemmy were to grow significantly and become a place where people could organize and communicate without being subject to corporate control or censorship, that could potentially do a great deal of good for people IRL. But constantly whining Nazi this, Nazi that is preventing that growth from happening.
Which is why this platform will never have a meaningful growth. But 90% of the user base is happy with that because they enjoy having their opinions validated and not challenged a.k.a. echo chamber.
Reminds me of another site. It’s why upvotes/downvotes will never work.
That other site is the 6th most visited website in the world, so clearly having upvotes/downvotes doesn’t preclude growth.
Does mbin only have upvotes or am I misremembering? And boosts I guess. That’s not my personal preference but the beauty is we can still access the same content from different platforms.
Well, never say never. It happened once already, in June/July 2023 the userbase grew more than 10x.
And we have seen a nice bump of 2k users in the past week or so as the fediverse has gotten some publicity. Reddit is not an option so we have no choice but to try to make Lemmy better, and I genuinely believe that the federated, decentralized concept can be the solution in so many ways.
Piefed and Kbin are also huge boons to our chances of success. Lemmy may not ever take off, but I expect one of the fediverse content aggregators eventually will. Reddit is simply too shitty of a user experience, they are guaranteed to fail.
#BigSame Friend.
I was looking at Tutanota for a bit. Guess I’m need to bust open that research again.
I migrated literally everything from Gmail around 2021. Gotta tell ya, I feel just about dumb as shit right now. I kind of understand people with those “I bought this before he sieg heiled” bumper stickers on their Teslas.
I see how moving out of the Google ecosystem could be a pain, but moving out of proton probably shouldn’t be that big of a deal?
Switching to another services for calendar, storage, or VPN should be simple. I kind of see how going to another email provider and not wanting to lose old conversations could be a pain though. In fact, that pain is what largely made me try to avoid using email for communicating with people in my life.
Either way, much less of a pain than buying a semi-luxury car only to see it lose basically all of its value because Elon is a nazi.
Why do you feel stupid? None of this could have been predicted. If you switched to any other privacy focused provider it might as well have been them this was about. You did a logical thing at the time, as many others here did. I don’t see how any of this isn’t obvious.
I understand the concern but it’s not like the CEO is sieg heiling… He is stating how things used to be and his hope that Trump will continue that trend. He posted 4th of December which was far before Trump got all his big tech chronies to sit Infront of US allies at his inauguration
I was planning to transition everything to proton this month. Now I don’t know what to do.
Tuta for mail, bitwarden for passwords, mullvad for vpn. You lose port forwarding.
I migrated last week. I dont miss proton.
There are other good VPN options that provide port forwarding but it’s usually at an extra cost or absolutely tedious to set up.
AirVPN, Windscribe, PIA, and another one I can’t remember. Personally I prefer the security and privacy of Mullvad but I use proton’s port forwarding and proton mail for quite a bit so the transition is gonna be annyoing…
PrivateVPN is what I use. No ties to the big VPN corporations known, pretty open about their stuff, decent price, small company, port forwarding over OVPN (not wireguard) and no-log policy.
The problem is I don’t think they have ever been audited but also because they are obscure enough, I don’t know if there are any watchdogs for them turning over info to authorities.
Is PrivateVPN the same as PrivateVPNAccess?
Why PIA? They’re manipulating people. Its owned by same company as express vpn, cyberghost and zenmate
Not to mention their terrible pricing policy
Honestly the lesson I took away from this is to not vendor-lock myself if I can help it. Maybe it’d be better to have a domain through which you can route incoming emails to any inbox? That way you can just hotswap email services if their CEO turns out to be a cannibal or something.
Or I guess just self host an email server
That’s actually a lot more effort than most self hosting tasks. And it’s an ongoing effort at that.
Personally I signed up for web hosting at the same company where my VPS is hoted, hetzner. The cheapest tier web hosting costs a couple of euros a month and gives you multiple inboxes on your custom domain, whereas proton and gmail wanted something like 6 or 7 euros per inbox per month
That actually doesn’t work. Most large email providers will put you into the spam folder unless you are a well known server. Microsoft doesn’t even bother with that and outright throws the emails away entirely. Plus, most ISPs block sending emails from residential IPs and cloud providers block sending them from cloud.
It is not that bad. I have been running my own mail server for 20 years and i generally don’t have more problems with it than users of ‘big and known’ mail server do (it is not like GMail is perfect). And when there are problems I am usually able to tell what happened.
But this does not mean I would recommend self-hosting mail server to everybody. I am an expert, have been doing this professionaly for years. And it is an ongoing fight. It is not like I set it up in 2000 and it has been working since then without changes or incidents.
I was doing it for a while and it usually worked, but the thing is you need email to always work. I’ve since moved to paying Migadu to host my email.
Do you send mail directly from your server, or do you use some intermediary?
I will admit I did not try it myself but I was under the impression it was pretty bad with the spam filters.
I send mail directly. I have a public IP address. I had to remove it (a few times) from a list of ‘dynamically residential address space’. I have configured the server carefully and implemented SPF, DKIM and DMARC. I have proper revDNS records. Currently my mail doesn’t seem to be considered SPAM by Google or others more often than other mails.
When filters consider some mail spam there usually is a reason. The trick is to find the reason and understand how to mitigate it. Some anti-spam measures are not fair (like blanket blocking whole countries or ISPs), but I was lucky enough not to be bothered by those.
yeah, I myself was already getting a little uncomfortable with how far proton was branching out. It’s a good thing that I was already making a transition to using my own domain using aliases through eforw.com
Tbh I think proton is solid. What the CEO said is just stating a fact of the situation 10 years ago and linking it to now. I don’t believe that’s right but he posted the message 4th of December which (if I’m not mistaken) was before it was clear all the tech CEOs were sucking his dick like we saw around his in inauguration.
I’d still recommend it, the other stuff the CEO says on twitter is all very logical and positive for privacy and against big tech. Unfortunately someone says something that is remotely questionable (not like this guy has outright praised Trump far as I can tell) and sudetly Proton is a dead service not considering all the good they have done and will (probably) continue to do
Don’t be weird. Do whatever you were going to do before. The services this company provides has not changed. That’s what matters.
I’ll be as weird as I want. My trust in them has been eroded and that is a major concern to me when picking a company to keep my data private. In the future consider staying out of the conversation if you have nothing of value to add.
Haha slow down, tough guy. If you can be as weird as you want, I’ll speak when I want. That made you sound like a hypocrite. Which around here, comes as no great surprise.
They’ve done nothing legitimate to lose your trust. You simply don’t like people who don’t think like you.
Check out the comment on this post by @pulsewidth, it provides some interesting perspective on this.
Mmmhm, Republicans are more likely to tackle Big Tech issues by funding them with a cold hard 500 billion smackaroos for AI research, right? /s
Gimme a fuckin’ break. D being trash doesn’t excuse this blatant endorsement of R. Never entertain the whims of the far right, no matter how sweetly they sing to you. History has taught us better.
Can’t really argue with any of that
No, make sure you read the top response to that comment. Pulsewidth omitted the original post by the CEO. Not only that, this was Pulsewidth’s first post. Not concrete proof of astroturfing, but it’s pretty sus
