this post was submitted on 28 Jan 2025
982 points (95.4% liked)

News

24240 readers
5259 users here now

Welcome to the News community!

Rules:

1. Be civil


Attack the argument, not the person. No racism/sexism/bigotry. Good faith argumentation only. This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban. Do not respond to rule-breaking content; report it and move on.


2. All posts should contain a source (url) that is as reliable and unbiased as possible and must only contain one link.


Obvious right or left wing sources will be removed at the mods discretion. We have an actively updated blocklist, which you can see here: https://lemmy.world/post/2246130 if you feel like any website is missing, contact the mods. Supporting links can be added in comments or posted seperately but not to the post body.


3. No bots, spam or self-promotion.


Only approved bots, which follow the guidelines for bots set by the instance, are allowed.


4. Post titles should be the same as the article used as source.


Posts which titles don’t match the source won’t be removed, but the autoMod will notify you, and if your title misrepresents the original article, the post will be deleted. If the site changed their headline, the bot might still contact you, just ignore it, we won’t delete your post.


5. Only recent news is allowed.


Posts must be news from the most recent 30 days.


6. All posts must be news articles.


No opinion pieces, Listicles, editorials or celebrity gossip is allowed. All posts will be judged on a case-by-case basis.


7. No duplicate posts.


If a source you used was already posted by someone else, the autoMod will leave a message. Please remove your post if the autoMod is correct. If the post that matches your post is very old, we refer you to rule 5.


8. Misinformation is prohibited.


Misinformation / propaganda is strictly prohibited. Any comment or post containing or linking to misinformation will be removed. If you feel that your post has been removed in error, credible sources must be provided.


9. No link shorteners.


The auto mod will contact you if a link shortener is detected, please delete your post if they are right.


10. Don't copy entire article in your post body


For copyright reasons, you are not allowed to copy an entire article into your post body. This is an instance wide rule, that is strictly enforced in this community.

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 

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.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] TsarVul 124 points 1 day ago (5 children)

I migrated literally everything from Gmail around 2021. Gotta tell ya, I feel just about dumb as shit right now. I kind of understand people with those "I bought this before he sieg heiled" bumper stickers on their Teslas.

[–] TheLowestStone 44 points 1 day ago (5 children)

I was planning to transition everything to proton this month. Now I don't know what to do.

[–] [email protected] 32 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Tuta for mail, bitwarden for passwords, mullvad for vpn. You lose port forwarding.

I migrated last week. I dont miss proton.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 day ago* (last edited 13 hours ago) (2 children)

There are other good VPN options that provide port forwarding but it's usually at an extra cost or absolutely tedious to set up.

AirVPN, Windscribe, and another one I can't remember. Personally I prefer the security and privacy of Mullvad but I use proton's port forwarding and proton mail for quite a bit so the transition is gonna be annyoing...

EDIT: Removed PIA due to dubious behavior.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 13 hours ago (1 children)

Why PIA? They're manipulating people. Its owned by same company as express vpn, cyberghost and zenmate

Not to mention their terrible pricing policy

[–] [email protected] 1 points 13 hours ago

Oof I forgot about that, you also reminfed me about a post that I can't seem to find anymore of a user fiscovering that they were connected to a US military base.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 day ago (1 children)

PrivateVPN is what I use. No ties to the big VPN corporations known, pretty open about their stuff, decent price, small company, port forwarding over OVPN (not wireguard) and no-log policy.

The problem is I don't think they have ever been audited but also because they are obscure enough, I don't know if there are any watchdogs for them turning over info to authorities.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 23 hours ago (1 children)

Is PrivateVPN the same as PrivateVPNAccess?

[–] TsarVul 27 points 1 day ago (2 children)

Honestly the lesson I took away from this is to not vendor-lock myself if I can help it. Maybe it'd be better to have a domain through which you can route incoming emails to any inbox? That way you can just hotswap email services if their CEO turns out to be a cannibal or something.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 day ago

yeah, I myself was already getting a little uncomfortable with how far proton was branching out. It's a good thing that I was already making a transition to using my own domain using aliases through eforw.com

[–] JustARaccoon 1 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (2 children)

Or I guess just self host an email server

[–] DreamlandLividity 19 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

That actually doesn't work. Most large email providers will put you into the spam folder unless you are a well known server. Microsoft doesn't even bother with that and outright throws the emails away entirely. Plus, most ISPs block sending emails from residential IPs and cloud providers block sending them from cloud.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 day ago (2 children)

It is not that bad. I have been running my own mail server for 20 years and i generally don't have more problems with it than users of 'big and known' mail server do (it is not like GMail is perfect). And when there are problems I am usually able to tell what happened.

But this does not mean I would recommend self-hosting mail server to everybody. I am an expert, have been doing this professionaly for years. And it is an ongoing fight. It is not like I set it up in 2000 and it has been working since then without changes or incidents.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 day ago

I was doing it for a while and it usually worked, but the thing is you need email to always work. I've since moved to paying Migadu to host my email.

[–] DreamlandLividity 1 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

Do you send mail directly from your server, or do you use some intermediary?

I will admit I did not try it myself but I was under the impression it was pretty bad with the spam filters.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 day ago

That's actually a lot more effort than most self hosting tasks. And it's an ongoing effort at that.

Personally I signed up for web hosting at the same company where my VPS is hoted, hetzner. The cheapest tier web hosting costs a couple of euros a month and gives you multiple inboxes on your custom domain, whereas proton and gmail wanted something like 6 or 7 euros per inbox per month

[–] [email protected] -1 points 1 day ago

Tbh I think proton is solid. What the CEO said is just stating a fact of the situation 10 years ago and linking it to now. I don't believe that's right but he posted the message 4th of December which (if I'm not mistaken) was before it was clear all the tech CEOs were sucking his dick like we saw around his in inauguration.

I'd still recommend it, the other stuff the CEO says on twitter is all very logical and positive for privacy and against big tech. Unfortunately someone says something that is remotely questionable (not like this guy has outright praised Trump far as I can tell) and sudetly Proton is a dead service not considering all the good they have done and will (probably) continue to do

[–] M137 14 points 1 day ago

Why do you feel stupid? None of this could have been predicted. If you switched to any other privacy focused provider it might as well have been them this was about. You did a logical thing at the time, as many others here did. I don't see how any of this isn't obvious.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 day ago

I see how moving out of the Google ecosystem could be a pain, but moving out of proton probably shouldn't be that big of a deal?

Switching to another services for calendar, storage, or VPN should be simple. I kind of see how going to another email provider and not wanting to lose old conversations could be a pain though. In fact, that pain is what largely made me try to avoid using email for communicating with people in my life.

Either way, much less of a pain than buying a semi-luxury car only to see it lose basically all of its value because Elon is a nazi.

[–] nieminen -3 points 1 day ago* (last edited 22 hours ago) (2 children)

~~Check out the comment on this post by @pulsewidth, it provides some interesting perspective on this.~~

Rescinded! Thanks for the context folks

[–] [email protected] 4 points 23 hours ago

No, make sure you read the top response to that comment. Pulsewidth omitted the original post by the CEO. Not only that, this was Pulsewidth's first post. Not concrete proof of astroturfing, but it's pretty sus

[–] TsarVul 8 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Mmmhm, Republicans are more likely to tackle Big Tech issues by funding them with a cold hard 500 billion smackaroos for AI research, right? /s

Gimme a fuckin' break. D being trash doesn't excuse this blatant endorsement of R. Never entertain the whims of the far right, no matter how sweetly they sing to you. History has taught us better.

[–] nieminen 4 points 1 day ago

Can't really argue with any of that

[–] [email protected] -3 points 1 day ago

I understand the concern but it's not like the CEO is sieg heiling... He is stating how things used to be and his hope that Trump will continue that trend. He posted 4th of December which was far before Trump got all his big tech chronies to sit Infront of US allies at his inauguration