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.
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.
I was planning to transition everything to proton this month. Now I don’t know what to do.
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.
Or I guess just self host an email server
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.
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
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.
Check out the comment on this post by @pulsewidth, it provides some interesting perspective on this.Rescinded! Thanks for the context folks
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.
Can’t really argue with any of that