I’m disappointed…I tried to not care about this CEO supporting Trump, but come on…now they ditch Mastodon, tomorrow they close source their clients…I’m losing trust to them, I used to think about them as knights in this capitalist world, but well. As someone once said “You either live and die as a legend, or live long enough to become evil”. I don’t want it to happen but yeah, I guess we all gotta find a good replacement for Proton services, sad but it is what it is.
Of all the fuckin places to move to they chose reddit 😭
Because they can control the dialog on reddit
🤨
Ditches fediverse but still use Xitter?
On top of the trump apointee praise?
Sus 👀
That’s not sus, that’s what anyone ought to expect him to do, because it aligns with his bourgeois interests. Why would he stay on a non-corporate, federated social media platform when he and his bourgeois peers can’t control the narrative?
This is very disappointing.
They have a large following on Mastodon so this doesn’t really make much sense. I’m inclined to believe that they left due to the hate they were getting because of the recent controversy.
Yeah. They can’t get Mastodon moderators to suppress negative publicity like they can on Reddit and other platforms.
They haven’t left bluesky but they got backlash there too and have stopped being active for the past couple of weeks compared to on Twitter.
if they cant suppress on reddit, they will go to facebook, which give them ability to do alot more.
And considering a lot of people on the internet make comments without being fully informed, the backlash is probably huge.
Hate is spreading a lot quicker than the truth.
However, the original Twitter post and their doubling down are just stupid responses and they shouldn’t have made them.
I think this is right on the money.
What is the recent controversy?
CEO is what I describe as a Right-wing Libertarian. Dude not only praised the trump FTC appointee, but also said “republicans are on the side of the ‘little guy’”. Andy Yen is one of the members of the Board of Trustees of Proton Foundation, the non-profit that owns a majority of Proton AG. He initially used his personal account, then later used the official account (so I’m assuming the other board members did not object to it), then later “apologized” for it and said he would use his personal accounts. The reddit account has a username with the number 88 in binary, which led some to speculate its a nazi (88 = HH = Heil H*tler) dogwhistle, to which Andy Yen says its his year of birth 1988. Kinda weird, but he could just be that clueless, who knows 🤷♂️.
From what I could gather from his public statements, including twitter: Andy Yen is also supportative of Ukraine and have donated to Ukraine, and is supportative of the Hong Kong protestors, and is against Russian censorship and against US red state’s Age Verification laws.
My view is: Andy Yen is an idiot, and there shouldn’t be any immediate threats, but its still not a bad idea to pre-emptively move, if you can, just in case he pulls a “Musk” and does the salute tomorrow.
He also used the word “triggered” in the Reddit comments in the way right wingers are wont to do, and then tried to play the “I’m not American, I don’t understand how that word looks to you” card. Never mind that plenty of non-Americans know perfectly well how that looks.
No, it’s far more likely he picked up that word and knew exactly how it was used because he’s been hanging out in far right spaces.
as a european I have no idea what tertiary meaning does “triggered” have
The reddit account has a username with the number 88 in binary, which led some to speculate its a nazi (88 = HH = Heil H*tler) dogwhistle, to which Andy Yen says its his year of birth 1988. Kinda weird, but he could just be that clueless, who knows
I mean this part I give him a pass on. It was right for people reading him to raise an eyebrow, because political signalling like that does happen, especially in a context where he’s making comments like he made. But in this case it was just a nothingburger.
It doesn’t make his “wasn’t intended to be a political comment” excuse any less gibberish though.
We unfortunately live in the world where saying “Trump is an idiot” and “Actually I was kidding. He’s the second coming of Christ” might only be a day apart.
The whole 88 thing is not generally know except probably in Germany and the US.
He is an idiot yes, but the internet is also making it seem like if you agree with one statement you agree with all statements of that person/party which is just wrong.
Always use your own domain on Proton and others. The laws in Germany aren’t as friendly as the one in Swiss so that can be causing issues as well.
Never heard the 88 thing till now. Not everyone is tied to what shit bags are doing all the time.
Its a really old one. Neo nazis have ysed it for multiple generations now
Like the “14 words”
The CEO came out as a fascist
Like Elon Musk recently?
This is just…not accurate.
So Proton ditched Mastodon but is still on Twitter, aka the Nazi cesspool, and Reddit. Both US propaganda platforms with heavy censorship.
Bad, bad move.
I have been defending Andy Yen’s idiotic comments because he’s not American and doesn’t understand the hyper-reactive nature between US Americans and US politics (because our government is literally run by nazis now), but this decision isn’t helping; it will fuel and reinforce the negative image already held by those who have canceled their accounts and those who are on the fence.
Proton marketing itself on privacy while recently calling out the danger of tech oligarchs makes their decision to leave Mastodon and keep using Twitter very confusing. Lot of mixed signals.
I have been defending Andy Yen’s idiotic comments because he’s not American and doesn’t understand the hyper-reactive nature between US Americans and US politics
And I could see the point, kind of, even though it strained credulity on substance. He seemed more confused to me than die-hard partisan. But it’s really hard to square what was effectively a blanket statement endorsing R’s with his subsequent comment that it “was not intended to be a political statement” (paraphrase).
And then also the official proton account doubling down on it a day later.
His whole defense hinged on making people believe Gail Slater being on the FTC meant she fought for little tech, but omitted her history leaving to became vice-president for legal and regulatory policy for the Internet Association which is a lobbying group for companies like Google, Amazon, eBay, and Facebook.
The Internet Association—a trade group for big technology companies such as Google, Facebook, and Amazon—spent nearly $176,000 to lobby the California legislature last quarter, according to the Washington Post. It is now running misleading ads on social media asking Sacramento lawmakers to weaken the law.
The group claims that surveillance-based advertising technology, which slurps up and broadly spreads consumers’ personal data without their knowledge, should be exempted from the CCPA. In truth, surveillance-based adtech is one of the worst privacy hazards that the law was designed to stop. It also provides little benefit to online publishers, and erodes trust between companies and their consumers.
That medium article that keeps being reposted from some random user with only that one article intentionally omits this work history after the FTC too.
Makes it harder to defend with the statement the official Proton account made on reddit which they have since then removed and kept editing. Makes you wonder what do they actually believe and if this is their attempt to be apolitical how much are they self censoring their true views on the matter to seem more palatable.
I need to migrate away from Proton ASAP.
mustve saw how reddit started banning a sht ton of accounts, and its starting to resemble facebook in some form. its all trump propaganda(negative or otherwise which helps him), reddit is censoring hard this month, it looks like its gearing to be bought off, and to encourage traffic from right wingers, because i keep seeing conservative subs being on the front page alot.
I have Proton email and will ditch it soon.
I’m seriously starting to consider moving from proton to Fastmail. My renewal is coming up in May.
I switched after the whole CEO issue, but tbh I was annoyed at how limited proton mail was because of encryption. Super happy with Fastmail in comparison! Got 2 domains linked, multiple servers using it for SMTP, a bunch of aliases and masked emails. Calendar and contacts setup on android with DAVx5 to de-google some more. So good.
I tried Proton years ago and didn’t find it that useful (I can manage my own PGP keys, thank you).
Started switching to Fastmail seriously this month, after having had mail delivery problems with mailbox.org because of DNSSEC issues (they use a deprecated SHA1 signature still) - I have used migadu.com for a different domain for a few years as well but the webmail is a bit sluggish and the spam filter too aggressive, I might end up consolidating on Fastmail for now
Sure it’s Five Eyes so a slight regression from mailbox and migadu, but if it works well enough I might be able to get my family to move off of Gmail so a net win
That’s really good to know! This may seem like a dumb question, but can you use any email app with fastmail? I see they have their own, but I’d really like to use Canary with it if I switch.
This is my exact setup, too. It works without any problem using either thunderbird or their web UI.
Consider mailbox.org too.
Cool, I’ll check them out.
Agreed. Fair price, good service.
There’s also Migadu which I currently use. It doesn’t have all the bells and whistles that providers like Proton and Tuta have with their E2EE but they don’t use any shady marketing or track you. Requires a custom domain though.
I never heard of them, I’ll check them out. Thanks!
I switched after the CEO came out supporting Trumps nomination and the republicans being the party of the small guy
Is Fastmail US based?
Australia
Ah, so 5 eyes. Tuta is German so 14 eyes. Not a lot of options out there
And now I’ve ditched Proton. Andy Yen’s comments made me skeptical, but I was still confident that their mission was intact. This move, to a social media platform with a demonstrated willingness to censor non-corporatist views, confirms my fears that they are giving up their principles.
Exactly this. I left after the previous comments but still felt they had integrity. That’s also starting to change
That’s in line with being from Switzerland. Act cool, but be sure to stick with the richer people and do their interest. Never used Proton (I use Tuta instead) for that reason only. You are free to call me racist.
I am Swiss myself and I feel like things are changing since Trumps second term, at least my friends seek closer ties to Europe now.
Proton gives me a bad feeling in the stomach, I would encourage people to not trust it. The guy is either a big Trump fan or most of his customers are from that base. The best option for e-mail is selfhost + pgp, the second best option are the various small companies offering email all across Europe.
Does Europe in your first sentence mean the EU or Europe in general, maybe even including Russia?
Russia
lol Russia is not particularly popular here right now, we are even on their list of “unfriendly countries” if you didn’t know.
One of the “countries” in that list is the whole EU. That makes it practically meaningless when they have countries like Hungary licking they ass day and night.
Some of the initial people involved did their university and post grad studies in the US, so they seem more American than Swiss to me and more chose Switzerland to conduct business after starting the company up after meeting at CERN.
Tuta isnt really a replacement for proton. They dont even support PGP encryption, which is kinda the whole point of proton.
Tuta uses standard algorithms also being used by PGP (AES and RSA or ECC) for encrypting the entire mailbox. In addition, Tuta Mail already uses post-quantum cryptography (Kyber) for quantum safe accounts, which is still a work in progress for PGP. Furthermore, Tuta does not use an implementation of PGP itself because PGP lacks important requirements that we have for Tuta
I so want to ditch Proton right now, but I have a lot of resumes out and have been using them for ~4 years, so all of my accounts are linked in a sense.
What to do what to do… I know and fully agree that what’s going on is sus, but I think I need to stick with it for a few more months until the job thing pans out.
Edit: I have a free Tuta account, I’ll start weaning everything off, then cut free when I don’t need to worry about missing an interview opportunity.
I recommend switching to a custom domain in the future so you can avoid situations like this from happening again, this way you won’t be locked down onto a single provider.
Sorry, could you please expand on that? Like buying your own domain and hosting your own email server? Or buying a domain and having Proton as the mail server backend?
Buying your own domain and pointing its DNS at your email provider. The email provider is still your host, but you get to use maroon@yourdomain.tld everywhere and you can seamlessly switch providers. I’ve done it a few times, now.
yea i used alot emails for my resume when i was job seeking, the one i used switched over during covid, limit “inacitivity to 6 months, deletes your account”, wish it dint. i unfortunately sitll use gmail, although i dont do anything signicant, need another one that doesnt delete your acc after a minimum amount of time. im using another service, thats not gmail or microsofts.
i would probably move all your resumes to another account, put it all on a cloud(i did it with drive, you can do it with dropbox?) and any new resumes use another email service.
Aww, is someone booty blasted they can’t control the dialog no more?
@ramenu … proton recommending communication through reddit was not on my bingo card. 2025 has already been a wild ride… *looks at date*
fml
people were using the vpn to evade reddit bans, but even reddit does not like vpn users anymore.
Can someone recommend a good and privacy oriented alternative to Proton Drive.
It’s sad that Proton bought SimpleLogin because I was and I’m currently using it before the acquisition.
Nextcloud on a paid plan from some company (e.g. Hetzner) or, if you’ve got the stones for it, Nextcloud self-hosted.
CryptPad. It doesn’t needs email to sign up.
Tuta mail
Tuta are also enshittifying.
How so?
They show you ads as a premium user and spam your inbox with “news” that’s just poorly disguised upsell attempts.
Do they? I haven’t experienced either of these. Where would I find the ads? Curious if my pihole is hiding them
Why
because their ceo came out as fascist and mastodon is calling them out.
I’m not super informed on that. Didn’t he say that he didn’t mean it that way? Could you clarify please? I wonder what other options there are? Tuta?
Tldr, the CEO is an idiot, Proton is bad at (social media) and there is a cultural difference between how people in the US look at politics
Thanks for the link, that’s a lot more context than the usual reactionary “Andy Yen said one nice thing about a Republican therefore he’s fascist pro-Trump MAGA” takes I’ve been seeing. Not only does it more or less disprove that narrative, it makes me question how much of the hate against him lately is genuine and how much of it has been seeded and signal-boosted by nation-state actors who don’t want people to use encrypted communications.
Yen is clearly trying to be nonpartisan and praise what he sees as good for privacy while pointing out abuses of power, regardless of who has the power at the moment. He sees this as his way of adding weight to the scale in favor of better privacy and tearing down big tech. I know many in my country and on the web are hyper-polarized and addicted to anger, to the point that if someone says anything even slightly positive about their perceived political enemy, it’s seen as legitimizing and aligning with that enemy, but I don’t believe that’s a healthy or productive mindset to have. I believe that kind of divisive attitude is preventing us from uniting with those who should be agreeable to our cause, and that’s exactly what the oligarchs want. It’s making us weak.
I’ve been on the fence for a while since this whole thing started, because I do use a paid Proton email, and it sounded bad, but I kept getting this nagging feeling I wasn’t seeing the full picture. That’s gone now - Andy may be politically and/or socially inept, and he may have a different perspective on what it means to support privacy and democracy, but I think it’s clear his heart is in the right place, and the work he and Proton are continuing to do for tech privacy is helping to erode authoritarian power structures, including Trump’s.
I am inclided to agree with you that Andy Yen is just an idiot and that Proton is doing it’s best to stay natural and make the most of the situation. However their communications team is pretty lackluster.
On another note, the article I linked is an opinion, so while it is laid out pretty well it is probably not telling the entire story. I have a custom domain on my Proton account so I can Switch if it ever goes to hell. I would advice you to do the same.
Yeah I looked further into the article and it indeed does not seem to paint the entire picture. Especially with the omission that after leaving the FTC, Gail Slater became vice-president for legal and regulatory policy for the Internet Association which is a lobbying group for companies like Google, Amazon, eBay, and Facebook.
And The Internet Association had been covered by EFF before highlighting some things they didn’t agree with.
The Internet Association—a trade group for big technology companies such as Google, Facebook, and Amazon—spent nearly $176,000 to lobby the California legislature last quarter, according to the Washington Post. It is now running misleading ads on social media asking Sacramento lawmakers to weaken the law.
The group claims that surveillance-based advertising technology, which slurps up and broadly spreads consumers’ personal data without their knowledge, should be exempted from the CCPA. In truth, surveillance-based adtech is one of the worst privacy hazards that the law was designed to stop. It also provides little benefit to online publishers, and erodes trust between companies and their consumers.
So medium article just glossing over who Gail started working for after leaving the FTC makes the omission a sign of incompetence or intentional with the knowledge it might weaken their argument. And who even is ovenplayer? We got no idea who this random person is so not covering the whole details makes me wonder why this medium article keeps being posted. Rather funny actually that the Trump tweet provided in the medium article omits this part too.
Well fair, I just found the Medium article to be more complete than most info that is shared around, but I already assumed that it was not complete. At the end the day I personally don’t have issues with Proton currently and they are still the best thing I can use since it’s located in a country like Switzerland. But I advice everybody to use their own custom domain so they can move whenever needed.
You can read past discussions here
Thanks for the link
Wow! That’s shocking. Any alternatives you recommend?
I haven’t fully committed to a new email yet to fully transfer over to, but I have been testing out tuta with it being one of the emails recommended by privacy guides. Still undecided though on what paid option to move to.
Tuta is located in Germany which is part of the fourteen eyes intelligence aliance. Germany also had a conservative party and a far right party win the elections.
Not saying Tuta isn’t good or anything, just wanted to share the info I have about it which might be relevant.
Already well aware of the CDU and AFD. As long as nobody forms a coalition with the AFD not too bothered. Of course, if they do then it becomes a big problem.
