I also made this switch a year ago, in part because I'm Australian and so is Fastmail. I miss some of the Proton bells and whistles, and my visionary plan had some great inclusions, but Fastmail is great. I just use the web app on my graphene phone and it works fine
That seems like the worst reason to use a product. If I had the funds for a non free mail host, I would choose one thats not going to be easy to target with a TCN or TAN.
Mail just isn’t something that’s built in a way that it can be a private service. I think most people should choose a provider based on price and features.
Yes, it’s nice that if everyone you know uses proton then you can send end to end encrypted emails with zero friction. But I consider that more of a side feature rather than a reason to buy it.
Purely Mail is a nice provider in that regard. $10 a year!
I do like FastMail a lot, though.
Proton mostly makes sense if you’re going to use the entire suite, which helps spread the cost and make it a good value.
>Mail just isn’t something that’s built in a way that it can be a private service.
No but theres a lot of daylight between "There might be intermediaries" and "The australian government can verbally request secret adjustments to this companies software"
I fail to see how that matters to the end consumer specifically in the context of an email product. It’s still ultimately a service dealing with plain text data that’s moving between providers in ways you can’t control very well to begin with.
100% of your email is read by someone else. You don’t send private information over email or store it in an email server.
Maybe so, but I just assume anything I write is being read by multiple different parties anyway. I use Signal too, but I don't trust that either. Face-to-face communication (inside my portable lead chamber) is the way to go
That's really all you need to know. If you can't trust the CEO (who is also the founder btw), you can't trust his crew. If you can't trust the crew, you can't trust their products.
That's all there is to it. If you're still using Proton products, you're basically admitting that you're a T***p supporter.
This article is clearly written by someone who doesn't understand how encryption works.
> What happens if I log out of all my proton accounts, travel to the other side of the globe, walk into the first library or internet café I find, and log on to mail.proton.me with my username and password?
The keys are encrypted to your password, that's how you can access your data maintaining E2EE.
Don't be fooled by the technical-sounding article that leads with software/licensing/product-related rationale but buries the real reason:
> After one too many PR scandals though, there was one that I just can't stomach as well as the rest. Which is... The CEO being a Trump man.
These are starting to pop up on HN (another example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49585161). Outright political posts get flagged here so the new tactic looks to be pretending to make a decision for technical reasons.
I was disappointed to learn that the article from 404 media about a "Proposed Nuclear AI Data Center" in Ypsilanti, Michigan wasn't actually a data center with an on-site nuclear power generator, just one that Los Alamos is partially funding and will use. Anyway I think the concerns of everyone opposed to data center construction in Ypsilanti mentioned in that article are stupid, I consider 404 media to be poltically hostile to my interests for writing about it with that editorial stance; and certainly linking to it doesn't make me more inclined to view Protonmail unfavorably.
Can you elaborate on why you think the OP is incorrect? The hit piece on the Ypstilanti data center is quite an embarrassment for any honest news reporter.
There's complex politics around hyperscaler data centers, and I'm sympathetic to the complaints against (though in full disclosure I am biased towards building anything, having seen my country held back for years by people opposed to building anything). But the UMich supercomputing center isn't a hyperscaler data center, and it's the height of disingenuous, cynical and dishonest politics to claim that it is. It's an academic research supercomputer. And FYI the protestors have been harassing UMich professors and their families, so sorry. I'm not going to be polite and give them any benefit of doubt. I know the people they're harassing personally and professionally and they're wonderfully kind and intelligent.
If the supercomputing project dies because of this, yellow journalists like 404 media have scientific blood on their hands.
There was a brief moment when the Proton CEO published a whole self agrandizing article with pics of himself and the wifey and what selfless people they are, and how she had her own identity and everything, that and all about the servers sitting inside the swiss alps underground, but hey it was free, still is a free add for email services with an almost completely non functional email service behind the adds. I still use it for certain technical things, but it's broken for everday use in the free version
The whole thing has the hink, hink with grue, almost like it's google with a different skin.
I now have my own web space and email, which is half broken right now, but that suits me as whatever does get through is more work and other time consuming stuff than I can handle
Maybe Proton’s copy needs some work, but another page on their website very clearly explains that emails aren’t encrypted when an email leave the ecosystem. Because, as the author points out, they can’t be.
Also, I hate Trump too, but a broken clock is right twice a day. It’s possible to agree with some of the things he says while not being a “Trump man”. Why should we be surprised that the company founded on anti big-tech principles would have a founder who is against big-tech?
Disagreeing politically is a perfectly valid reason to avoid a product, though the author will have a very hard time finding alternatives with CEOs that aren’t right-leaning. Not a lot of CEOs are on the side of labor.
Sometimes you really have to pick the best available option after weighing all the factors.
Sure, the CEO of Toyota wore a Trump hat to gain favor. That’s a heck of a lot different than the laundry list of distasteful things Elon Musk has done as a CEO of a car company. I’d pick Toyota over Tesla just like I’d pick Proton over Google or Microsoft, and that’s not only a political choice but a product quality choice as well.
Oh, I totally agree that it’s a valid reason. I just don’t find the authors gripe very meaningful. I say that as somebody who switched to Proton for political reasons too haha.
Here’s some shocking facts: emails aren’t anonymous as a protocol, neither private too, stop trying to find an email like that. VPN as the commercial service isn’t anonymous either, there’s always a “trust us” factor, and in this ever changing world, your policy should be always zero trust. Neither proton, nor mullvad, nor signal, none of these popular platforms provide the anonymity and even the privacy you are expecting. If the protocol itself wasn’t designed with anonymity, privacy, and security in mind, everything follows is just marketing and maybe worse, a honeypot.
There are two themes in this article that end up both being flawed:
- Proton’s not an honest/forthright company in terms of open source and for-profit status
- Proton is flawed technically and isn’t really encrypting your data.
Starting with the former, I think the author is letting perfect get in the way of good. Proton has a whole lot of open source going on with their products and that is a whole lot more than anyone else in the space considering the breadth of their products. I think it’s perfectly understandable for much of their backend to be closed source. If you’re looking for complete open source you’re almost always looking at self-hosting solutions, and that’s just not what Proton is solving.
Yes, a service like this needs to make money to be viable long-term. Having a non-profit parent company is way better than being a public company with public shareholder pressure or being owned by Bain Capital.
As far as the second theme here, the author is just plain mistaken on Proton’s encryption. The author is just straight up willfully misunderstanding the technical aspects of the services and goes further than that by accusing Proton of AI marketing copy, which I am personally not seeing. It looks like normal, sensible, and pretty easy to understand writing to me.
It might be nice if Proton offered a more user-friendly alternative to PGP encryption for non-technical non-Proton email recipients, like using some kind of secure temporary link inside an unencrypted email, but also, Proton doesn’t have to be the one to provide that service. The author is asking Proton to do the impossible and fix the flaws of email. And you still have a really nice benefit that every Proton user you email has e2e encryption baked in. There’s really no other service with as significant user base offering that.
The author goes on to accuse Proton of spreading themselves too thin despite having a really strong product portfolio. There’s really nothing that their apps are missing besides strong photo organization in Proton Drive similar to something like Ente, Google Photos, iCloud Photos, Immich, etc. They’re pretty much a one-stop shop for everything you could want and are a drop-in replacement for big tech cloud suites with a very respectably better privacy footprint.
Finally, I’ll address the political bit even though I shouldn’t: if you’re looking to find a CEO who isn’t right-leaning in some way, good luck! I’ve never known a CEO who was on the side of labor. Sometimes you have to pick and choose your battles there.
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[ 0.20 ms ] story [ 28.5 ms ] threadThat seems like the worst reason to use a product. If I had the funds for a non free mail host, I would choose one thats not going to be easy to target with a TCN or TAN.
Yes, it’s nice that if everyone you know uses proton then you can send end to end encrypted emails with zero friction. But I consider that more of a side feature rather than a reason to buy it.
Purely Mail is a nice provider in that regard. $10 a year!
I do like FastMail a lot, though.
Proton mostly makes sense if you’re going to use the entire suite, which helps spread the cost and make it a good value.
No but theres a lot of daylight between "There might be intermediaries" and "The australian government can verbally request secret adjustments to this companies software"
100% of your email is read by someone else. You don’t send private information over email or store it in an email server.
Or any of a million things.
The Australian government needs to be treated as an absolute supply chain risk.
https://tuta.com
That's really all you need to know. If you can't trust the CEO (who is also the founder btw), you can't trust his crew. If you can't trust the crew, you can't trust their products.
That's all there is to it. If you're still using Proton products, you're basically admitting that you're a T***p supporter.
> What happens if I log out of all my proton accounts, travel to the other side of the globe, walk into the first library or internet café I find, and log on to mail.proton.me with my username and password?
The keys are encrypted to your password, that's how you can access your data maintaining E2EE.
> After one too many PR scandals though, there was one that I just can't stomach as well as the rest. Which is... The CEO being a Trump man.
These are starting to pop up on HN (another example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49585161). Outright political posts get flagged here so the new tactic looks to be pretending to make a decision for technical reasons.
If the supercomputing project dies because of this, yellow journalists like 404 media have scientific blood on their hands.
They do have one, “Township Fights Nuclear Weapons Data Center By Passing a Moratorium on Electrical Infrastructure”.
Which according to the article, is exactly what it’s for.
Also, I hate Trump too, but a broken clock is right twice a day. It’s possible to agree with some of the things he says while not being a “Trump man”. Why should we be surprised that the company founded on anti big-tech principles would have a founder who is against big-tech?
Sometimes you really have to pick the best available option after weighing all the factors.
Sure, the CEO of Toyota wore a Trump hat to gain favor. That’s a heck of a lot different than the laundry list of distasteful things Elon Musk has done as a CEO of a car company. I’d pick Toyota over Tesla just like I’d pick Proton over Google or Microsoft, and that’s not only a political choice but a product quality choice as well.
Right now I’m stuck with Filen as the “least bad option.”
Bang. It's political.
Opinion discarded.
With Multi-Party Relays you no longer have a trust a single entity not being malicious or compromised.
Disclaimer: I run obscura.com, which does exactly this with Mullvad (our partner) as the Exit Hop.
- Proton’s not an honest/forthright company in terms of open source and for-profit status
- Proton is flawed technically and isn’t really encrypting your data.
Starting with the former, I think the author is letting perfect get in the way of good. Proton has a whole lot of open source going on with their products and that is a whole lot more than anyone else in the space considering the breadth of their products. I think it’s perfectly understandable for much of their backend to be closed source. If you’re looking for complete open source you’re almost always looking at self-hosting solutions, and that’s just not what Proton is solving.
Yes, a service like this needs to make money to be viable long-term. Having a non-profit parent company is way better than being a public company with public shareholder pressure or being owned by Bain Capital.
As far as the second theme here, the author is just plain mistaken on Proton’s encryption. The author is just straight up willfully misunderstanding the technical aspects of the services and goes further than that by accusing Proton of AI marketing copy, which I am personally not seeing. It looks like normal, sensible, and pretty easy to understand writing to me.
It might be nice if Proton offered a more user-friendly alternative to PGP encryption for non-technical non-Proton email recipients, like using some kind of secure temporary link inside an unencrypted email, but also, Proton doesn’t have to be the one to provide that service. The author is asking Proton to do the impossible and fix the flaws of email. And you still have a really nice benefit that every Proton user you email has e2e encryption baked in. There’s really no other service with as significant user base offering that.
The author goes on to accuse Proton of spreading themselves too thin despite having a really strong product portfolio. There’s really nothing that their apps are missing besides strong photo organization in Proton Drive similar to something like Ente, Google Photos, iCloud Photos, Immich, etc. They’re pretty much a one-stop shop for everything you could want and are a drop-in replacement for big tech cloud suites with a very respectably better privacy footprint.
Finally, I’ll address the political bit even though I shouldn’t: if you’re looking to find a CEO who isn’t right-leaning in some way, good luck! I’ve never known a CEO who was on the side of labor. Sometimes you have to pick and choose your battles there.