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!
There are a couple issues I’m aware of that tend to make people wary of Proton.
First is Andy Yen’s open support of fascists. Which you mentioned in your post. I know that he has tried to walk back his comments and claim they aren’t political, but anyone claiming the GOP is anything other than fascists and oligarchs is either too stupid to trust, or dangerous because their beliefs are aligned with those fascists.
Second is that Proton continues to expand their suite of services and are trying to get people to buy into all of it, much the same way that people bought into the google suite. This centralizes many services, which is problematic if the company makes changes that do not align with the users wants and needs. So many people push to avoid this. Centralization in general opens users up to enshittification that is difficult to extract yourself from.
There may be more, but that is what I’m tracking. And it’s why I ended my subscription with them, and moved most of my things away from Proton mail.
The big difference, of course, being that you’re paying a not insignificant amount of money explicitly for privacy, not a “free” service like Google. While Enshittification can happen everywhere, they’ve got a pretty direct incentive not to just start selling data and that sort of thing compared to the incentive Google had. The bigger concern is the security risk of all your eggs in one basket, but that’s a convenience vs security tradeoff we make all the time. Each user needs to assess for themselves that tradeoff. But just the encryption at rest alone along with seemingly not reading your emails already puts an average Proton use way ahead of an average Google one, and moving them to a complete suite is a lot more likely than to 6 different services. That’s a hard sell for an average user.
Also, I think the framing of open support of fascists is frankly ridiculous, personally. The way people were talking about it I was afraid we were talking full maga here, but the guy literally just praised a single appointment in anti trust… and she did have some actual bona fides that made her surprisingly (for this administration) qualified for that job, she has actually worked blocking mergers. This wasn’t a Robert Kennedy appointment, this appointment could have been under any admin in the last few decades and nobody would blink, if anything might also have been praised for the pick. Broken clocks, guys, broken clocks, they’re right sometimes.
Everyone can make their own choice here, but praising a rare decent pick from a shitty politician doesn’t nearly reach a divestment bar for me and I think probably all except the most militant.
It wasn’t just praising an appointment. “By working on the front lines of many policy issues, we have seen the shift between Dems and Republicans over the past decade firsthand,” Yen wrote. “Support for cracking down on corporate monopolies is popular on both sides of the political spectrum. Unfortunately, corporate capture of Dems is real, and in the end, money won. It is hard to see how this changes, and Republicans are likely to lead the antitrust charge in the coming years.”
He is praising the party as a whole. The party that is full of fascists and pedophiles. The dems are corporate shills, but in what fucking reality can any sane person claim the Republicans are better? That is why I framed it as open support to fascists. During the controversy, when people had already expressed disappointment and highlighted the problematic nature of his original statement he doubled down.
You can’t remove the context this statement was made in though, which was about the appointment. And let’s be real here: he is not wrong about corporate capture of the Democrats at all. Yes, saying the Republicans are any better is ridiculous, but this strikes me far more like stroking the ego of a guy that likes having his ego stroked and made a rare decent pick for anti trust. This is no different than what Mamdani did visiting the White House… do we cancel him too for appeasing fascists? Or can we acknowledge choosing to try and engage with and manipulate a guy that’s shown to be easily manipulated is probably a strategic choice more than ideological?
And the thing he’s praising here is anti trust. Sure, I think it’s wrong to say Republicans are better on this issue, but literally the thing he’s praising is very much antithetical to fascism. How can we really say he’s supporting fascism then? Where are his posts supporting his ICE policies? Where are the comments supporting overturning a democratic election? He makes one comment supporting anti trust efforts and suddenly he must be a crypto fascist because it came from Trump? Not buying it, man.
I really think trying to portray Yang as something like the My Pillow Guy, which is the level of discourse a lot of this has had around it, is really, really disingenuous and I think only serves to make people take these accusations less seriously even when they’re levelled against people who truly are fascist sympathizers at the very least.
I’ve noticed that there’s a peculiarly dogmatic approach to antifascism here, and I think that colors a lot of the discussion around Proton.
Its the same wirh firefox… so much FUD spreads for every tiny missetep. And the result is likely that more people stay with gmail/chrome or people killing upstream by supporting forks
Could you elaborate further or clarify specifically why this approach “colors” the discussion here? Almost all approaches to antifascism kinda have to be dogmatic in my view