Lately, their posts on Mastodon became full of comments questioning their CEO political views. I guess, this is the answer to those, a clear one.
Proton is really just trashing their rep.
Three years ago I made an issue on their feedback page because the android app doesn’t really work on degoogled phones, it requires gms for notifications. Still not fixed.
Nice privacy focused App that can’t fully be used if you take privacy seriously.
FYI i use a degoogled FP3 with microG and I don’t have any problem.
One wonders why the rest of the Proton Foundation hasn’t stepped in and gotten rid of Andy; I assume it’s just because they don’t actually care about privacy, they’re just cryptonerds.
I suggest you give a read to “Privacy is power” by Carissa Veliz (on the board). She also gave a very good interview on the podcast “firewalls don’t stop dragons”.
I also don’t think “cryptonerds” applies to people like Tim Berners Lee.
I’d say this move seems too dumb even for fiction, if that wasn’t the SOP for the entire country I live in.
Given the context though, I’m curious if one of you privacy experts can change my mind on how I approach email.
I don’t use email for any meaningful communication where I expect privacy. It is essentially the way for companies and a few other organizations to send me low priority information and/or confirm my identity to reset a password or whatever. Because of that, the only attributes of an email service I really care about are reliability and availability, including not having emails silently blocked for not coming from a “trusted” provider.
So what is the practical risk of just using a Gmail address for that stuff, equivalent to hiding in plain sight? Yeah it helps Google fine tune their advertising model for me, while I’m running Linux on all my machines and blocking ads on any device I touch. My social media is Lemmy and my streaming service is Jellyfin.
Am I risking too much if I use it as the corporate contact point that it is? Am I just letting my white/straight/cis/male privilege show through?
I don’t use email for any meaningful communication where I expect privacy. It is essentially the way for companies and a few other organizations to send me low priority information and/or confirm my identity to reset a password or whatever.
As a privacy enthusiast (expert seems too much), this immediately stood out. Privacy is the context of emails means that all my data which includes the content of the messages but also the metadata (who I talk to, which services I use - like in your example -, when I communicate, how often, etc.) is kept private, meaning not used for anything else than providing me the service (i.e., let me send and receive emails). From this point of view, even if you consider the content of your emails not sensitive, already the fact that you do use company X (because they sent you a password reset email) is data about you, and as such can and will be mined by Google to profile you or to sell it.
Am I risking too much if I use it as the corporate contact point that it is? Am I just letting my white/straight/cis/male privilege show through?
Nobody can tell you this, because risk in this context is purely a subjective estimation, and you are free to do what you please. However, I do care about my privacy, which means that I want to minimize the amount of data about me available for sale or to others in general. For me the motivation is quite simple, while I do block ads everywhere too and I generally don’t have an impact in terms of getting personalized ads, once the data is collected I have no idea what will be used for, by whom and for what purpose. It doesn’t even matter if the data actually allows to infer accurate things about me, it’s enough that someone (e.g., insurance company, employer, bank, government, etc.) is gullible enough to believe that inference is correct. In the book “Privacy is power” (written by Carissa Veliz) she also develops a very interesting argument about the fact that violating your privacy usually means also violating the privacy of the people near you (the people with whom you share demographic, the people you communicate with etc.). This could be another point of view to consider.
Anyway, if for you the above is fine, there is no other significant risk you are taking, and you should keep using Gmail if that suits you.
A technical note. Secure email providers generally can have technical controls (i.e., encryption) to protect the body (content) of the email, and in some cases some small amount of metadata (e.g., Tuta encrypts also the subject). Generally though, you are still trusting the provider to perform that encryption (especially because a mail from Gmail -> Proton/Tuta would be encrypted by Proton/Tuta) and to not use metadata for any purpose besides delivering the emails. So privacy here doesn’t mean absolutely removing the data from a third party, but it means giving it to a third party who uses it (due to contractual obligation, business incentives etc.) only for the intended purpose in a privacy-preserving way.
I mean yeah I think the main problem is just Google having all that data about you and potentially selling it to others whether that be for advertising, robocalling, or other things. So it really just comes down to how comfortable you are allowing Google to be able to use your emails and communications from corporations to see what things you like. Only time it really matters more is if you are using email for more personal or secure communications which yeah I would always prefer using better encrypted more messaging focused apps like signal for or just talking in person when possible.
I’ve committed a bunch of relatives and myself to a year of the Family plan, and now most of us want to leave… What a mess.
Wait, you bought/gave money to Proton so early in its life? Why do people keep falling for these over and over.
If a ‘can run on low resources sustainably’ is legit, going to have test and wait for it to see first.
Otherwise we need to accept what we can and can’t have based on what is possible without being greedy and at someone else’s expense.
Do they really need a team of people to post the same thing to X, Mastodon, BkueSky, etc? I’m honestly surprised they don’t have some bot to make all the posts for them to those services. Sounds like a cop out to me.
i heard they stopped posting on bluesky weeks ago, not surprised they are active on meta platforms, and X.
They specifically said they don’t want to do automated posting, to avoid writing and not interacting with the community. I see no value in them doing this, considering we can get the same content via RSS, blog page or email newsletter. Presence makes sense if it means presence. If it means a bot reposting content, anybody can do it, but the value is very low.
It wouldn’t be hard to do simultaneous posting. People figured that out ages ago.
It’s not a problem of complexity, it’s a deliberate choice of not wanting to do that, because it is synthetic content disconnected from the community.
Exactly. If they need help maybe someone could create something so they can post to BlueSky, Matrix, Lemmy, and Mastadon at same time soon. Also set it up for the up and coming Flashes and Pixelfed.
I agree this is an issue. They move away from a privacy oriented community. Additionally, the reason they give is vague and easily dismantled. What I’m interested in is why this would be a good enough reason to switch providers. They haven’t changed anything crucial in their mail offering, so why should I switch?
kinda wierd for proton to promote on reddit, when reddit doesnt allow VPN usage to most users, mostly for spam/botting/ban evasions.
That may be, but they have always done that. Reddit is the only place where they have a real presence for years. It’s not like they are moving there now. They have always been predominantly there on the first place.
Such delicate snowflakes these ceos…
on reddit they can pursue sitewide bans more easily on users, since reddit had started doing this month. its to silence all criticism against them, im betting facebook will be thier next stop.
one simple reporting of your acct will get you immediately banned from the sub, and potentially a sitewide ban.
I do think the second part of your statement was unnecessary.
Yeah. In my experience babies can be pretty fun people to be around and they have much healthier ways to express their emotions.
In a normal scenario yes. This is not longer a normal situation. You support Trump? You better start hiding…
*member of the board
Ouch! They really are working hard on getting any privacy oriented person to leave them.
I’m glad I have moved away from them.
fleeing to reddit of all place, banning any instance of discourse, much like facebook is now.
Out of curiosity, where did you move from Proton?
Tuta
I was using mainly the emails from proton, I moved to mailbox.
At one point I was planning on moving my drive and VPN with them but their Linux support was really lacking, especially the CLI support so I’ve never done it and I’m glad I didn’t.
For the VPN I’m using Mullvad integrated with tailscale, for the drive in using my own synology NAS and tailscale to connect to it.
Protón is just a bunch of criptonazis
This really sucks, I like using Proton and now I want to leave… WTF
What kind of expensive resources you need to just post on Mastodon?
ability to silence, and censor or criticism,?-proton probably
Mastodon has that too, so Wonder why leave Mastodon at all
But people still can see the other messages. Instead a censored post on Reddit or Instagram is invisible
reddit allows you more ability to censor people permanently from the site, in the form of sitewide bans and automatic removals and such. and they can probably with the request of the admins take down any other proton subreddit that is potentially critical of them. and reddit recently has given mods more privileges to ban people with thier filters.
Good to know, thank you
i came here from reddit because of such a ban, apparently if you report someone too much you can get banned, or if you report and the mod doesnt like it you can recieve a sub ban, or even sitewide temp or permaban, and alot of the mods have admins ears, so you can get banned more easily. thats why proton wants to go to reddit, they just remove all negative comments, and ban people. and reddits ban feature is very intense(any attempt an evasion is pretty difficult nowawadays)
They can’t control all the instances. I think that if they tried that with the one that I am on they would be laughed at.
Way easier for a company to make its own reddit and censor any post that talks about why you should probably start to look at moving your data before they are quietly asked to hand over all the data they have.
Makes sense
A human being.
Whoever posts on reddit can copy paste to other platforms, if they are to lazy to use a software that consolidates it for them.
i disagree as there are plenty of tools to post to multiple platforms at once. but yea if they were so kind to actually interact then yes
@mailbox_org@[email protected] are running their own mastodon server and it’s an excellent mail service provider. @[email protected] are also present on Mastodon and is likewise an excellent mail service provider.
Pointing people to reddit, as if that’s an alternative. When a VPN provider makes such bad choices it’s tempting to imagine that the decision was influenced by somebody who wants to secretly get the message out that the company is no longer to be trusted, because it’s hard to see any other logic in it.
We have to wait and see what the next audit is going to find, that will give us more security than any kind of information provided from Proton themselves.
The Swiss laws are also helping to make it so they keep the privacy standards high.
But I would definitely use your own domain for your Proton mail currently
Reddit has a ton of users. Mastodon is marginal.
Privacy usually doesn’t mean following what’s popular.
