this post was submitted on 16 Jan 2025
169 points (96.7% liked)

Privacy

32753 readers
2235 users here now

A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.

Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.

In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.

Some Rules

Related communities

much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)

founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
 

Copied from the reddit post:

Hi all, last night, a post from last year from my personal X account suddenly became a topic of discussion here on Reddit. I want to share a few thoughts on this to provide clarity to the community on what is Proton's policy on politics going forward.

First, while the X post was not intended to be a political statement, I can understand how it can be interpreted as such, and it therefore should not have been made. While we will not prohibit all employees from expressing personal political opinions publicly, it is something I will personally avoid in the future. I lean left on some issues, and right on other issues, but it doesn't serve our mission to publicly debate this. It should be obvious, but I will say that it is a false equivalence to say that agreeing with Republicans on one specific issue (antitrust enforcement to protect small companies) is equal to endorsing the entire Republican party platform.

Second, officially Proton must always be politically neutral, and while we may share facts and analysis, our policy going forward will be to share no opinions of a political nature. The line between facts, analysis, and opinions can be blurry at times, but we will seek to better clarify this over time through your feedback and input.

The exception to these rules is on the topics of privacy, security, and freedom. These are necessarily political topics, where influencing public policy to defend these values, often requires engaging politically.

The operations of Proton have always reflected our neutrality. For example, recently we refused pressure to deplatform both Palestinian student groups and Zionist student groups, not because we necessarily agreed with their views, but because we believe more strongly in their right to have their own views.

It is also a legal guarantee under Swiss law, which explicitly prohibits us from assisting foreign governments or agencies, and allows us no discretion to show favoritism as Swiss law and Swiss courts have the final say.

The promise we make is that no matter your politics, you will always be welcome at Proton (subject of course to adherence to our terms and conditions). When it comes to defending your right to privacy, Proton will show no favoritism or bias, and will unconditionally defend it irrespective of the opinions you may hold.

This is because both Proton as a company, and Proton as a community, is highly diverse, with people that hold a wide range of opinions and perspectives. It's important that we not lose sight of nuance. Agreeing/disagreeing with somebody on one point, rarely means you agree/disagree with them on every other point.

I would like to believe that as a community there is more that unites us than divides us, and that privacy and freedom are universal values that we can all agree upon. This continues to be the mission of the non-profit Proton Foundation, and we will strive to carry it out as neutrally as possible.

Going forward, I will be posting via u/andy1011000. Thank you for your feedback and inputs so far, and we look forward to continuing the conversation.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] uranibaba 1 points 7 hours ago

Any generic IMAP/SMPT provider + Thunderbird + PGP will provide the same level of security that Proton does - that is assuming they didn’t mess their client-side encryption/decryption or key storage in some way.

And isn't that the point? I don't have time nor do I want to learn about PGP and how to encrypt email. Someone sells that service, great. And it is not like I cannot send normal emails to anyone else. They are using the same standard, not some made up version of SMTP (when sending to other servers, I assume any email from client A to client B both being Proton customer never leave their server, so no need for a new protocol).

Proton is doing to e-mail about the same that WhatsApp and Messenger did to messaging - instead of just using an open protocol like XMPP they opted for their closed thing in order to lock people into their apps

Proton themself provides a way to export emails in a decrypted format. It is even cross platform. https://proton.me/support/proton-mail-export-tool And all they do is open source, here is the code for their mail server: https://proton.me/support/proton-mail-export-tool. They seem to be using ordinary standards, but what do I know?

I cannot agree with you and I do not think your arguments holds, I would even go as far as to say that they are flawed (example being claiming "closed thing" while being fully open source using open standards). It seems to me that they have something that people are willing to pay money for. You are not one of them (nor am I).

I don't personally use them as an email provider because of the limit on how many domains they allow as a standard.