The “privacy-first” company surprised its user base when CEO Andy Yen lauded Trump on social media.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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 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.
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.
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
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
"If an elephant has its foot on the tail of a mouse, and you say that you are neutral, but your CEO and official company social media accounts are publically praising the policies of the elephant, the mouse will not appreciate your alleged neutrality."
Curious how so many people decided to ditch them and switch (vocally on Lemmy at least) and now they back pedal/clarify/whatever. Turns out we have power and using it works. Sorry not sorry.
Edited: pedal instead of petal.
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.
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.
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.
Yep, I moved to tuta the day Andy decided to out himself as a MAGA dipshit. The only way I’d go back is if he resigns or gets forced out. At the absolute minimum Andy Yen has shown extremely poor judgement in claiming Republicans are the party concerned with people’s digital rights. That tells me he fundamentally does not know what he’s talking about, and I do not trust Proton under his leadership anymore.
As a side note, If anyone’s looking for a VPN alternative, I highly recommend Mullvad.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Edit: for those downvoting, this is factual. Just go check the tweet and the reddit comments he did.
If you want to be pissed at someone at least choose what that person did or said.
I cannot fathom being that stupid to believe that Republicans are anti-monoploy when they give huge corporation massive tax breaks and removes barriers for mega mergers
Seriously. Kahn was actually trying stuff. I don't know how anyone could look at Big Tech falling in line with Trump and think that they're going to be tough on anti-trust, anti-big business.
I've been with tutan for two years now. The service is ok, but they still have some limitations that bother me a bit. Before this issue with Trump, I'd have considered move to Proton, but I guess I'll stick with Tuta.
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.
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.
I just cancelled my subscription and moved everything to Tuta. Tuta also seems to have a political stance much more aligned with my own: diversity, privacy oriented, and eco friendly.
Yeah I'm very much now considering alternative options like Tuta now. Been a Proton user since 2020 and subscribed for over 2 years with them, and didn't have any intention of moving until now.
I strongly recommend Mullvad. Exceptional performance, wireguard support and if you're really paranoid about anonymity you can literally send them money via post.
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.
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".
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'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.
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.
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.
There are countless mail servers one can use. I use a mail server hosted by Swedish ISP Bahnhof (which I trust). You can also self host. But then you need to be on the dark webs if you really care about privacy (I dont recommend this).
Or Delta Chat. Or Signal/Matrix/Session/Whatever. This is the preferred choise. EMail is legacy.
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.
They literally do this on a schedule every year, this isn't any different than what they did last year, or the year before that, when there wasn't any of this conflict.
DEFINITELY do not go 1password. They took a massive VC investment and it is only a matter of time before they find a way to monetize it. Ignoring the fact they absolutely destroyed the app.
Bitwarden (you can host yourself with vaultwarden) or KeepassXC.
You might want to have a look at this site to study-up on available/recommended tools: https://www.privacyguides.org/en/
I use Mullvad VPN myself and am happy w/it. Ditto Bitwarden which works well and is cheap. I have a Tuta account but detest the UI and the fact that they don't support IMAP/SMTP clients, or PGP, so I do my own PGP encryption/decryption using Thunderbird Mail on desktop which has built-in support for it. Also I use Fastmail as a (paid) provider (no built in PGP but tons of other bells & whistles) though mailbox.org looks interesting and is well-priced. Finally I use addy.io for anonymous aliases/forwarding and they have good PGP support.
My stance on Proton is my stance on GrapheneOS: just because the creator is bad doesn't mean the software is bad. As long as the software is better compared to the alternatives then I seen no reason to stop using it.
Note: better can mean more privacy-friendly, cost-friendly, sustainable, nice to use, open, etc.
Oddly enough, I found the opposite to be true with companies like Nestle: the news of them killing children makes me dislike their chocolates.
I don't know much about the creator of GrapheneOS. What's the bad about them? I know they're a little dogmatic, as security/FOSS folk can sometimes be, but I've not heard anything beyond that.
All I could tell from my recent search into FOSS Android OS's is that they shit on competetitors like crazy. It's pretty funny, albiet concerning, to see the official Reddit account bash on the competition.
My stance on Proton is my stance on GrapheneOS: just because the creator is bad doesn’t mean the software is bad. As long as the software is better compared to the alternatives then I seen no reason to stop using it.
I think the major difference is that for a software package or operating system like GrapheneOS, theoretically people can audit the code and verify that it is secure (of course in practice this is not something that 99% of people will ever do). So to some extent, you technically don't have to put a ton of trust into the GrapheneOS devs, especially with features like reproducible builds allowing you to verify that the software you're running is the same software as the repository.
For something like Proton where you're using a service someone else is running, you sort of have to trust the provider by default. You can't guarantee that they're not leaking information about you, since there's no way for you to tell what their servers are doing with your data. Accordingly, to some extent, if you don't trust the team behind the service, it isn't unreasonable to start doubting the service.
This is where audits come into place. Currently Proton only made the result of their security audit public, but you can also get an accounting firm to audit the privacy statement.
Not endorsing them or anything, but PureVPN has been audited by iirc Deloitte on their privacy statement. I have verified this a couple year by then sharing the conclusion of the report from Deloitte with signature.
Proton should do something similar and yearly and could have a lot more faith in them. An accountant isn't going to risk his career for something like Proton's privacy statement. At least I would hope not
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.
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 :)
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)
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
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.
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.
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 really like Fastmail's web client - just the right mix of 1990s web and "reactive" eye-candy web. The phone client is OK as far as I can tell, don't use it much. The service itself has always been great and I've been a subscriber for 10-15 years, long before Proton existed.
Welp... Just paid them 80€ for a year and was in the process of migrating my gmail accounts to it. I guess I just lost 80€ and I'm migrating to somewhere else then...
And also during that discussion with their support team, state your reason for leaving. That will get a lot more attention than the rest of us whinging online where we can easily be ignored.
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.
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.
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.
This is so disappointing. I've already migrated my passwords back to KeePass. Time to start hunting down other alternative. This is what I get for allowing myself the comfort of a centralized ecosystem.
Try using a @protonmail.com or another concealing email service to order online. Many websites automatically reject transactions made with these email domains because they are associated with fraudulent behaviour.
I use simplelogin aliases for everything. I have never had any problem with any purchase.
So, I understand this may happen, but claiming that "many websites" do is just plain misinformation.
So, try placing an online order with a @trashmail.com or @armylspy.com email address then tell us what happened.
There are maasive lists of bad and dodgy email domains that are used to help screen out dodgy orders. Some of these lists include "privacy" domains like Proton.
If a merchant is receiving an order from someone trying to hide their identity, wouldn't that merchant say "if I can't trust the email address, what else can't I trust about this customer?"
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
have thousands of open providers instead of the tiny fee enormous ones we got now
With distributed/federated services, people still always gravitate towards the largest providers. We see that on Lemmy and Mastodon too.
I agree with you though. I've been self-hosting my email for many years now, using Mailcow. I use an SMTP relay for outbound email though - it's a hassle to deal with IP reputation otherwise, especially if you don't own your own IP space.
What would be a good alternative? I refuse to support this. Thankfully, I have my own domain, so anything where I can use it would be great, and moving shouldn't be that hard. Bonus points if I can use wildcards, or at least have a few emails, like spam@mydomain and other.
It does make sense that a country located in Switzerland has this type of being "neutral", it's seems very similar to what the country was doing in WW1 and WW2.
Anyway, I'll be keeping my Proton account. It works pretty well and I have more faith in the laws in Switzerland than in the EU. Saying that I still have more faith in the EU than the rest of the world if it comes to privacy.
If anything changes in the future I'll be moved in about an hour or two.
Interestingly, if I set my VPN location to Switzerland, I can watch YouTube videos without logging in. Everywhere in the US requires me to log in and be subjected to advertisements first.
Yeah I definitively know which service is not getting my donations or subs this year. I'll continue using their free service for a while until I can migrate most stuff. After all it's all their cost. If they want to be nazis, the least I'll be is a load to them.
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