I’ve been a paid Proton Unlimited customer for several years now and aside from a few small complaints, I’m generally very happy with the services I’m paying for. I agree that there is too much focus on “sidequests” like Wallet and Meet before core products are fully rebuilt and meeting expectations. I agree that Linux versions and some feature implementations are taking a long time. However, I have a fully functioning suite of Mail, Drive, VPN, Calendar and more that meet 95% of my needs. To be fair, I’m sure the zero-access/zero-knowledge encryption aspect makes development much more difficult.
If you’re worried about political affiliations/interests, I’ll give you that Andy Yen has made a few worrisome comments. I’m not sure what to do there. Assuming there aren’t repeat occurrences, I’m satisfied with their statement about the French political figure sponsorship.
If it’s the FBI cases and subpoenas, it comes down to understanding the difference between privacy and anonymity, and knowing what strategy is required to achieve actual anonymity.
So why (especially on Lemmy) is there so much Proton hate/relunctancy? Eager to hear some non-biased, fact-driven thoughts here!
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They have sketchy marketing that over promises the idea of privacy without actually providing it and my personal user experience with it was pretty ass.
I don’t care too much of them as a product, but when they pretend to care about privacy laws and such, it really bothers me because their actions clearly show that they don’t.
Their stupid “muh swiss laws” cop out for everytime they hand over data is especially infuriating because of the many other Swiss based services that did or do not follow such a method of operation.
PirateBay offered more security than these guys and it took the US Government threatning Switzerland before they eventually seized their servers in 2006. It was unsuccessful and the website was back up after 3 days. Even after the court trial against the founders, they continue to run it to this day.
You friend, are missing the point - or more accurately you are relegating it to a “minor bullet on the list”.
It’s not the quality of knife produced, it’s who the producer is and how he will use the profit if you buy it from him.
You can spin desperately to find a contortion that you can personally abide, but it doesn’t change the objective reality.
It’s a good company now. But that company makes money from its products (and the CEO makes money this way). So they can find their politics and further it off the backs of consumers.
It’s not about the products themselves. It’s about voting with your wallet. It’s sort of the same as Chick Fil A. People don’t hate the food. It’s very good quality. They pay their workers very well and the business is fine. But people don’t want to fund that political leanings and lobbying of the person who owns it.
It’s also sort of the same as Harry Potter and JKR. Most people aren’t worried about the books. Instead they care about giving JKR money to further her ability to lobby against and help others destroy the rights of LGBTQ people (Trans people specifically).
At the end of the day it was never about their services and all about the political leanings of the CEO who outed himself and then changed what he said to “fix” the record when presented with proof contrary to his belief.
What did he say that showed his “leanings”? From what I understand, he only commended one thing that he thought Trump did well. Not that he thought Trump was a good person or anything.
Maybe I’m forgetting the exact quote and my memory fails me. 😅 But yeah, I chose Tuta specifically because of the political thing. I just can’t remember that there was something specifically that showed him as a Trump supporter in general.
Let me go back and find the screenshots. This could take awhile. Bare with me.
Edit: This may be a crapshoot (I screenshot everything like a mad man).
Here’s a post with links to archived records of what happened.
https://lemmy.world/post/24301835
https://lemmy.world/post/24344212
https://theintercept.com/2025/01/28/proton-mail-andy-yen-trump-republicans/
So far as I can remember this wasn’t about comments that supported Trump. It was about Republicans being “the party to hold big tech accountable” and also make progress on public issues.
People in the reddit comments came with both popcorn and receipts and then he edited those original comments and got called out for that. Then there was a whole official statement that was problematically political while claiming the company is politically neutral and the fact that as the CEO he used the proton official account for his original tweet which kicked the whole thing off.
Altogether it was badly handled.
Definitely. Thank you for digging all that up for me.
Yeah I think I’m good without Proton. Matter fact I might just delete my free tier account.
Helpful response - thanks!
People like to hate.
I’m coming from a position and stance similar to yours, a paying customer for many years, etc… I can completely see criticism of the proton platform for various reasons, such as some feature sets, your mentioned slow to market on what seems like priorities to the community, the security stance of eggs in one basket, etc… I think proton deserves honest criticism on many fronts, and also aren’t the answer to everybody’s threat model. Fine.
The rest? It’s hate. It’s not even stance or opinion. Its hate. The smallest things are taken and the reason to throw the baby out with the bathwater. Andy Yens comments haven’t been THAT bad compared to the political people he gets associated with. But okay, I can see taking the small concept and saying it’s evidence of a bigger picture behind HD scenes. But then there’s hate. But proton set up their organization to prevent a single person (like Yen) from dominating and taking them in the wrong direction, but that gets ignored. Just hate. Let’s talk about a news article where out of context proton “gave away” user info (when in reality it was all the fault of the user). But we’ll ignore all the times proton didn’t give up information they were asked for. Because that goes against the hate squad.
Again, if somebody doesn’t like proton, good for them. Don’t use them. Think they are the devil, good for them advise people as to why and to stay away from their products. But most of the hate comments aren’t expressing any of that. Its just hate, and if you don’t see it too then you are stupid and deserved to be hated too. That’s the vocal majority. That doesn’t mean its the majority opinion, it just means the loudest voices are saying that.
Sorry, my answer is a bit of a rant saying I agree with you. I’m sure many will disagree and that’s fine. But opinions are allowed to be shared both ways.
Because most of what you said is true but Lemmy is, unlike the most popular platforms, full of very selective individual. The overton window is different here than the mainstream. We half very different threshold and here in the Privacy community even more so on that topic. It might be “good enough” for most but if it’s not entirely open source, or rather free software, and with reproducible builds, and self-hostable, and federated, and built by people with impeccable background, and… and… and… that starts to be quite a bit.
I said this in numerous other posts, IMHO what matters is doing better, not “best” that unattainable. For some people Proton is better than what they had until now, e.g. GMail, but for others who move away from GMail to Proton and now self-host, it’s not good enough anymore.
So it depends on where you are on a multidimensional spectrum that is unique to your needs.
Not exactly. The overton window here is normal, it’s rather others that often have an extremely warped view, being indoctrinated to worship impoverishing themselves, to support oligarchs and surveillance capitalism.
That’s not my understanding of the definition of the Overton window. If I check Wikipedia it’s about mainstream, “The Overton window is the range of subjects and arguments politically acceptable to the mainstream population at a given time.” which is precisely why I contrasted our own “local” Overton window to the “normal” mainstream one. Also “normal” means what is now the norm, it’s now about what’s “right” or “wrong”.
Sure I would prefer our local Overton window here in the Privacy community of Lemmy to be the “normal” one, the mainstream one, and I do how it is shifting this way, but until they actually match, if they ever do (which I doubt) then I think it’s important to distinguish what we want versus what is.
Because many (most?) Lemmy users prefer to ignore that - if you look too close - most stuff they use was created by people that they would absolutely hate in person.
In my mind the ideal product maintainer for an Lemmy approved product has to be part of the LBTQ+ community, has to be some people of color, atheist, vegan and must subscribe to the EXACT same flavour of leftism the individual Lemmy user has sold his soul to.
In my mind the ideal product maintainer for an Lemmy approved product has to be part of the LBTQ+ community, has to be some people of color, atheist, vegan and must subscribe to the EXACT same flavour of leftism the individual Lemmy user has sold his soul to.
Maybe I’m in the minority here, but as long as the maintainer isn’t a hateful person championing movements I consider grossly immoral (fascism, racism, lgbtq+ hate, hypercapitalism, etc.) or committing acts I consider to be grossly immoral (abuse, rape, torture, human trafficking, etc) I’m happy to support a good product.
most stuff they use was created by people that they would absolutely hate in person.
This is largely true. If it’s a personality thing I don’t mind, but deeply held beliefs and actions are another thing entirely. I’m trying to change where my money, time, and effort gets spent to avoid enriching or benefiting fascists that want to immiserate, harm, or eliminate from existence me or those I care about. Unfortunately, I sometimes have to pick my battles… which is kind of fucked up when you think about it.
I moved to infomaniak myksute from two reasons, they have better app - proton drive on ios doesn’t allow search, and its less than 2chf per month for 1TB of storage
They take governments at their word, and allow those governments to ban people from proton for bogus reasons with no pushback, no review or appeal. They can slander you behind your back, for Israel or whatever, you will get your account frozen, no way to contest it.
Fuck proton.
Can you link to any examples?
That’s literally the opposite of what they do. They don’t even entertain information requests from any government accept the Swiss, since that’s where Proton is.
Bruh they’ve got lawyers on hand fighting subpoenas
I’ve always been Antiton. /s
You’re an incurious git that thinks you can pay for something contrary to what the market sells. I pay, therefore I believe the marketing material.
A centralized suit of tools sold by one capitalist-company does not make that company a comrade. They fight for their own capitalist-interests and the goal is a market-monopoly that enriches their owners. They are not open. They are not open to inter-network collaboration. They are capitalist and they hate user freedom.
From the drivel you’ve typed Google, Microsoft, et al will ‘meet 95%’ of your needs. “But I pay.” “The marketing material says they’re private.” Are you a child?
Proton: you can have privacy only if you pay us and use our proprietary tools exclusively. Press X to doubt.
You can have privacy now, for free. You’re too incurious to use those tools and liberate yourself though.
It’s always nice when people let you know to block them for juvenile and petty behavior that would make a redditor blush before they actually manage you get to you.
LMAO right??? I can’t agree more
I’ve recently needed a “shared” new account and I’ve tried Proton. I regret it.
- Their calendar will NOT work with open technologies from F-Droid and such. They require the use of their proprietary app, or their web version, or paying. Paying is actually generally fine for me, but not when I have a feeling that I’m just paying for more of their proprietary development.
- Their email system will NOT work with open technologies. Same as above, you won’t get it to work with Thunderbird or K9mail out-of-the-box.
- As an implication of the above, paying them will NOT, in any way, help open standards and open technologies. You’ll be only helping their business.
On the plus side, they have at least not requested my phone number upon registration. That was the only plus for me.
In total, if you want true ownership, open technologies, distributed technologies where the power and infrastructure is split across great many parties, then you should be against Proton. I personally chose disroot for now.
There are still situations where Proton makes more sense to recommend, such as to a political activist. I believe this group is niche though, as 99% of people really want ownership, freedom to share and less money to pay I think. It’s not a business need, it’s a human thing.
The inability to add the account to a standard email client is why I stopped using them. Electron Mail exists now, which is an improvement, but I still have to download each email and import them into my client.
you won’t get it to work with Thunderbird or K9mail out-of-the-box.
I use Proton with Thunderbird as my mail client and it works fine. For years now. That was a basic requirement for me to sign up for any mail service inc Proton. If it won’t work with a local mail client, I won’t use it.
I couldn’t get K9mail to work with proton. Do you run that “bridge” server to have it work on the computer?
Yeah. They have to have something like that, to support E2EE. They can’t depend just on HTTPS for that, b/c their server would have to see the unencrypted contents to send it over HTTPS. I believe the bridge is open sourced, but that’s just from memory. I’d hve to go search to be certain.
Also if I remember (Ha! Don’t take my word for this! My memory is shit!) they support E2EE with other mail services that use PGP to encrypt on the backend. Ofc, if you send to gmail or something then google sees everything. So this helps, but onyl under the right conditions.
They’re using full end to end encryption for most things. There are no open email or calendar standards that handle encryption. So interoperability limitations are a natural consequence.
I’ll take private over open every time.
There are no open email or calendar standards that handle encryption.
That would be a nice sounding argument, but actually, if you pay them, then all of a sudden calendar exporting becomes possible:
“Share calendar
Upgrade to a Mail paid plan to share your calendar.”To confirm, click https://calendar.proton.me/u/0/ then click on the cog near your calendar on the right -> Click again the cog Settings button on the right for your calendar -> Share calendar
Shareing a calander is very different. That’s simple.
I thought you wanted to use an open source calander app.If that’s all you need, then you only have to pay for the service, it’ll work fine.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but, regarding the first point, in what way are the calendar clients proprietary? Unless I am missing something, the clients for iOS and Android are open source and licensed under GPLv3 while the desktop client (part of the mail app) appears to be licensed under AGPL v3.
The email system not working with Thunderbird etc. out-of-the-box is true but that is kind of understandable, considering that the emails are only stored and transmitted to the first-party clients in an encrypted form that other clients couldn’t work with? And you could use the mail bridge (which is also open source, if I am not mistaken) to expose them as a local server to be used by Thunderbird etc., right? Maybe not ideal but I’d agrue it’s “fine”.
I do agree that there are things to dislike about Proton but those two don’t seem like problems in my opinion…
maybe i’m a bit odd for my reason but i don’t like their price model. that they try to price themselves like a mobile contract where things are cheap initially so you subscribe and then they get more expensive once you are in their ecosystem. no company that really cares to do right by users should do things like that.
and this despite them wanting to be a non profit company? i get that you still gotta make money of course but you can also do that by having one month and 12 month cost the same or maybe mostly the same.
and on top of this then there’s also that? this is the same browser and the same cookies i just once googled for their vpn prices and once i went over their general pricing page that started with mail pricing and then switched over to vpn pricing. i’m not logged in with them or anything.
one tries you to buy into a two year plan and the other into a one year plan but why do they even have two different types of trying to get new customers kind of deals and one is worse than the other? just makes me not like them.
It’s really all about proportionate response. You need to do what your situation demands.
People who criticize Proton often have very high standards. Maybe they self-host everything and expect you to do the same. Maybe they live under constant threat of torture or assassination because of their political statements, and they assume you face the same risks. As long as those unspoken assumptions hold true, their advice is actually pretty solid. Next time you see comments like that, try digging deeper to uncover the invisible but foundational assumptions behind them.
Honestly, those are extreme circumstances, and most people don’t need to meet such strict standards. Just check your personal cybersecurity threat model and act accordingly. If you don’t even have one, you’re definitely not in the same boat as those guys.
If you live in a some backwater dictator land stuck in the dark ages, your need to take these things seriously. If your life is at risk, your threat model likely requires you to take security and privacy very seriously. On the other hand, if your threat model is all about giving the middle finger to Big Tech for philosophical reasons, you need something else. For example, switching from being a Google product to paying for Proton products is probably the right and proportionate move, given your your situation and goals.
Security and privacy also involve balancing convenience with your goals. A solution needs to be convenient enough to be practical. Your personal tolerance for inconvenience and your desire for privacy and security should guide your choices. For many people, using Proton for everything is a convenient option, and that’s why it’s the right choice when their threat model doesn’t demand stricter measures.
I’ve also previously written a comment about Proton hate.
This might be it and is why I suggest proton because not everyone is tech savvy and a good competitor to big tech with a good track record is well needed.
It’s definitely a lot better than what most people are currently using. It’s also good enough for most cases, so I think it’s a pretty solid starting point.
I self-host NextCloud myself, which provides shareable calendars, contacts, drive space, photos and collab office suite. It doesn’t do email. For email, I have my own domain and point the MX records at whatever service I currently happen to be using.
Proton seems to be trying to do all of this, but I don’t want one org holding all that personal data of mine, even encrypted. The only people who need access to my NextCloud data are my family, which is much easier to manage than thousands of accounts.
