- 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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Maaaan, what the fuck?!?
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 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
And today I got an email saying they’re donating a million dollars to support non-profits for privacy and freedom. Timing, timing, timing.
Imagine being so fucking brainwashed you believe Republicans are for “the little guy”
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.
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.
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.
I already switched from Proton Mail to Tuta. No regrets
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’m considering switching. Would you mind sharing what bothers you?
I’m not the person you were asking, but I recently tried tried Tuta with my own domain and decided to look elsewhere due to a few things;
- No way to import mail, despite it being announced as “worked on” back in 2022. This is a fairly huge blocker IMO.
- Email rules don’t seem to apply until you view (and I assume decrypt) your mailbox. This led to some annoying behaviour like push notifications for emails that should have had rules applied to them.
- Spam filtering is all over the place - it’s overzealous and filters legitimate emails, and at the same time it lets in plenty of actual spam.
- The mobile apps are odd - you get realtime push notifications, but when you open the app and view your mailbox, it takes 20-30 seconds for it to show the email it just notified you about (even if you tap the notification).
- Their history of outages and instability are a big cause for concern IMO. Email is a crucial service, so uptime, deliverability, and data integrity are paramount.
For routine/non-sensitive email, they feel like too much hassle for the average punter in my opinion. And if I put on my industry hat; their frequent downtime is a huge red flag, and a sign that they either don’t know what they’re doing or don’t have enough cash to operate properly.
Having said that, I still think they’re the best current option if privacy/encryption is your only concern - to the best of my knowledge no one else takes that quite as seriously as they do.
Thank. That was very thorough.
I’ve been using Tuta since 2018 so I’ll give you some of my gripes:
- The domain gets blocked by spam filters when I email other people. Not necessarily Tuta’s fault but annoying.
- I get a ton of spam and phishing emails. A ton. Everyday I’m flagging like 4-5 of them.
- Tuta just got labels. I can now label my emails but Proton had it for years (I also use Proton)
- Tuta constantly have outages. I hope they improve their infrastructure.
- I personally like Proton’s UI/UX better
- I use the desktop client in both Windows and Linux. The Linux one is an Appimage that I have to run using --no-sandbox and I just don’t feel comfortable doing that. Proton has Proton Bridge which I can use to interface with Thunderbird which I prefer. Now whether it’s as secure or not I don’t know because security isn’t my specialty but I like using Thunderbird for my email client.
Edit 1: fixed typo
The domain gets blocked by spam filters when I email other people
Do they not let you use your own domain name? I wouldn’t use an email provider that forces you to use their domain… It makes it a pain if you ever want to switch provider.
They let you use your own domain now. But I’ve been using this provider since 2018. The article I linked to was written in 2022 so 4 years later. I was already established so I’ll have to go through a lot of services to change it. But if I change everything to my domain then what is preventing that domain from getting flagged? I don’t know enough about spam filters.
But if I change everything to my domain then what is preventing that domain from getting flagged?
You likely won’t ever be sending spam, phishing emails, viruses, etc from your own domain, so it has no reason to get flagged.
It’s worth the pain to switch to your own domain, since you’ll likely never have to change your email address again. I’ve used several different email providers over the years, but if you email me at an email address I used 20 years ago, it’ll still get to me today.
Thank you. That was helpful.
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.
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 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 really don’t think there’s anything wrong with a respectful and well-intentioned correction.
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.
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
I’m researching the suggestions that people have made here: tuta, bitwarden, and mullvad.
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.
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.
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
At first glance, they check all the boxes for me.
Removed by mod
Then here’s what Proton’s team said on Reddit
are you REALLY asking us to care about their PR damage control? They can literally cherry pick anything and say anything that’s true and try to tie it back into their argument. What stands is his initial heartfelt public statement.
Zero of the statement praises Trump or praises Republicans
Great pick by @realDonaldTrump . 10 years ago, Republicans were the party of big business and Dems stood for the little guys, but today the tables have completely turned. People forget that the current antitrust actions against Big Tech were started under the first Trump admin.On Twitter (your know, the fascist communication network)
Tagging Trump directly (ohh look at me, I’m a good boy, give me contracts, invite me over)
your definition of Zero and mine are WILDLY different.
I feel like I’ve read from hundreds of Lemmy users total agreement that the Democratic party
Yes, the standard far right argument, no no they’re both bad so this isn’t bad.
of the sad reality that Republicans with their very hard-on-Silicon-Valley rhetoric are more likely to actually
There it is, you’re not even going to sugar coat it, No no, the Republicans WHO ARE DISMANTLING DEI AND MEDIA FACT CHECKING
are going to
ctually reign in the big tech companies (more )than the Democratic party
GTFO, or at least come up with a half reasonable argument. That’s serious not even worth the time to post on…
TL;DR: storm in a teacup, I’ll be keeping my Proton mail account.
If you’re for real, (and I expect you’re just more damage control), sounds like you’re in a good place with like minded friends not worried at all about their safety.
p.s. yes this is my first Lemmy post.
Ahh so more damage control. Gotcha!
Their PR Department can do better
“Tagging Trump” because it was an answer (quote? Not sure what is the xitter term) to the tweer where Trump announced the pick for antitrust.
I do disagree with the person you are answering to, he did praise republicans. He did in a very narrow context and for specific (although opinable) reasons and he praised Trump for having made that specific pick.
Personally, I don’t see what the big deal is.
If by reigning in big tech you mean a cartel style system where companies need to provide funds to Trump to continue existing, sure. But there is no chance that the Republicans will reign in big tech : they are big tech.
You are leaving out the part where Andy Yen said that the tables have turned and the Republicans are now the party of the small people.
Andy Yen’s statement is downright pathetic and misleading. People are right to stir up shit because that’s the only thing corpos understand.
This isn’t a storm in a tea cup, this is the CEO of a company telling us who he really is and people choosing to tell him to get fucked.
Your post reeks of astroturfing.
the Republicans are now the party of the small people
He didn’t. He clearly meant small tech in that context, opposed to big tech\monopolies. Not only this is the only interpretation that makes sense, but he said this himself in a clarifying (personal) reddit comment.
Lololololololololol, bad look.
How about literally right wing propaganda
Good first post
Good catch. Someone else here in the comments detected a hint of astroturfing… perhaps they were onto something
Edit: they opened a Lemmy acct to make that post, fwiw
Yep, a complete drama over nothing that got many people start a witch hunt. We already reached the point in which the guy is now a Nazi for having chosen a username with 88 in it, despite the fact that he is Taiwanese AND born in that year. Basically this is the well-meaning, internet vigilantes version of “bill gates injects 5g microchips with vaccines”.
It’s what happens when politics becomes faith.
Nice try, fed.
Same for me. Was it kind of stupid what the CEO said? Yes, sure, but who the fuck does not do that from time to time?
I also hate this mentality, that if you agree with a decision a party / person made, then that means you agree with everything they stand for. Bitch, no!
Nicely said.
I had my doubts, I mailed Proton and they responded with a statement Yen his opinion isn’t that of Proton, his comment while using the Proton account was a mistake which has been deleted and Proton changed to a foundation so no one, including a CEO like Yen, can change what Proton stands for.
Thank you for clarifying!
Thank you for the summary.
Sir, this is Lemmy’s. We don’t allow reason here.
Reason is fine, doesn’t mean everyone has to agree.
Look, reason my ass
I don’t get why anyone would stay on a site they thought reason wasn’t allowed at.
I’ve been frustrated several times at what I perceive as Lemmy bias that borders extremism, but on the whole it’s perfectly reasonable. Essentially every response to the parent comment agreed with it (I have yet to see someone disagree but perhaps I haven’t scrolled enough).
Lemmy isn’t big enough to feel you need to stay, as Reddit was when comments like this were plentiful.
It’s just an old lame internet joke.
More theater do to this today:
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.
Or the year before again etc. It’s their 7th edition. Apparently the memory of outraged netizens has a very short time window…
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.
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…
Ok Trumper.
What did he mean by this
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.
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.
I mean, “spin it”, that’s literally what the tweet said, in a response to a tweet (from trump, hence the tag) that announced that pick. He praised the pick and generalized on the fact that republicans are more likely than democrats to fight big tech. Good or wrong that’s everything that was said and a perfectly legitimate opinion, even if I may disagree.
This also happened in December, not yesterday.
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.
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’t* 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.
edit: missed a 't
What’s the alternative in your opinion? Google, or something else, and why?
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.
Tbh it seems like there are no good alternatives to protonmail. You just have to host your own
Yep and if you look at some corrupt sports bosses like Sepp Blatter, Gianni Infantino and Rene Fasel, all are Swiss.
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.
