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!
I’ve recently needed a “shared” new account and I’ve tried Proton. I regret it.
On the plus side, they have at least not requested my phone number upon registration. That was the only plus for me.
In total, if you want true ownership, open technologies, distributed technologies where the power and infrastructure is split across great many parties, then you should be against Proton. I personally chose disroot for now.
There are still situations where Proton makes more sense to recommend, such as to a political activist. I believe this group is niche though, as 99% of people really want ownership, freedom to share and less money to pay I think. It’s not a business need, it’s a human thing.
I use Proton with Thunderbird as my mail client and it works fine. For years now. That was a basic requirement for me to sign up for any mail service inc Proton. If it won’t work with a local mail client, I won’t use it.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but, regarding the first point, in what way are the calendar clients proprietary? Unless I am missing something, the clients for iOS and Android are open source and licensed under GPLv3 while the desktop client (part of the mail app) appears to be licensed under AGPL v3.
The email system not working with Thunderbird etc. out-of-the-box is true but that is kind of understandable, considering that the emails are only stored and transmitted to the first-party clients in an encrypted form that other clients couldn’t work with? And you could use the mail bridge (which is also open source, if I am not mistaken) to expose them as a local server to be used by Thunderbird etc., right? Maybe not ideal but I’d agrue it’s “fine”.
I do agree that there are things to dislike about Proton but those two don’t seem like problems in my opinion…
Correct. I do that, to use Thunderbird as my mail app with Proton.
The inability to add the account to a standard email client is why I stopped using them. Electron Mail exists now, which is an improvement, but I still have to download each email and import them into my client.
They’re using full end to end encryption for most things. There are no open email or calendar standards that handle encryption. So interoperability limitations are a natural consequence.
I’ll take private over open every time.