this post was submitted on 28 Jan 2025
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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.

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[–] [email protected] 26 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (18 children)

I really don't understand why smart people put their eggs in the proton basket.

Big (shady) money rule Switzerland. A Swiss server or company isn't safer or more trustworthy. Quite the opposite.

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

Aside from the political stuff, I'm also concerned about proton from a technological standpoint. You can't use a standard mail client with proton, you have to use their own. So, if they wanted to, they could push out a single malicious update which would render all of the end-to-end encryption stuff pointless. You could argue that using Thunderbird + GPG + Gmail is more secure/private.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 22 hours ago* (last edited 22 hours ago)

You can't use a standard mail client with proton, you have to use their own.

Part of the reason is that the protocol that's uses for retrieving emails (IMAP) is pretty old and doesn't support end-to-end encryption. JMAP is supposed to be a modern replacement, but it's not widespread yet, and also intentionally doesn't support E2EE.

E2EE is hard, for example searching has to be done client side rather than having a search index on the server side (since the server is not able to decrypt the data to index it). I haven't tried Proton but I'm curious as to how they solve this... I guess they'd sync the entire mailbox and index it locally, like what (non-mobile) Thunderbird does.

I really question the value of E2EE for emails, though. Communication between servers (e.g. someone on Gmail sending an email to a Proton user) uses TLS but is not, and will likely never be, end-to-end encrypted. Emails you send to other providers are also not likely to be encrypted on the other provider's end.

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[–] LifeInMultipleChoice 17 points 1 day ago (1 children)

More theater do to this today:

[–] [email protected] 3 points 23 hours ago (1 children)

They literally do this on a schedule every year, this isn't any different than what they did last year, or the year before that, when there wasn't any of this conflict.

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[–] [email protected] 248 points 2 days ago (24 children)

Just when I'm done migrating all my email shit to Proton, the CEO turns out to be a nazi. A classic.

[–] [email protected] 73 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (11 children)

Same. Considered getting a domain for my email, but ended up just switching directly to the protonmail domain. Regretting that now.

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[–] Semi_Hemi_Demigod 49 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Only way to make sure your email isn’t run by a Nazi is to run it yourself.

Unless you’re a Nazi in which case FUCK OFF

[–] eclipse 54 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Even for the technically literate, running a mail server is an ongoing nightmare. If you think it's easy, you're not doing it right.

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[–] TsarVul 124 points 1 day ago (8 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 (20 children)

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

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[–] BroBot9000 157 points 2 days ago

Yeah this is a masks off moment for them and people better be paying attention!

[–] [email protected] 147 points 2 days ago (1 children)

"If an elephant has its foot on the tail of a mouse, and you say that you are neutral, the mouse will not appreciate your neutrality."

-Desmond Tutu

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[–] Ensign_Crab 85 points 1 day ago (1 children)

The sort of Swiss neutrality that doesn't care whose teeth the gold is from.

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[–] [email protected] 98 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (5 children)

Swiss company says "Nazi's aren't so bad."

The more things change the more they stay the same.

When they say they're "neutral" lets not forget what "neutral" meant during World War II. It meant making a fucking shitload of money at the expense of the rest of Europe.

Also, the geography of Switzerland is how they were able to convince Germany to not invade. A few US Nukes dropped from the sky make their geography a moot fucking point this time around.

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[–] [email protected] 88 points 2 days ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (13 children)

Yep, I moved to tuta the day Andy decided to out himself as a MAGA dipshit. The only way I’d go back is if he resigns or gets forced out. At the absolute minimum Andy Yen has shown extremely poor judgement in claiming Republicans are the party concerned with people’s digital rights. That tells me he fundamentally does not know what he’s talking about, and I do not trust Proton under his leadership anymore.

As a side note, If anyone’s looking for a VPN alternative, I highly recommend Mullvad.

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

I cancelled my subscription and moved to tuta and mailbox.org in a couple of hours.

I don't consider this a nothingburger and I didn't like how it played out.

Dollar vote.

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