Unnecessary and deeply concerning bow to the new “king”

Update: position got backed up by an official Proton post on Mastodon, it’s an official Proton statement now. https://mastodon.social/@protonprivacy/113833073219145503

Update 2, plot-twist: they removed this response from Mastodon - seems they realize it exploded into their face!

The writing was on the wall for proton for a while now

No it hasn’t. Back this claim up with some evidence

I wouldn’t call it “writing on the wall,” but they have done some not-so-good things over the last few years:

Handing over data for their email services (which was legally required) (ref).
Releasing a Bitcoin wallet. The problem for me is that Bitcoin is inherently not private.
Lying in marketing. Proton claims “no data or speed limits” for their free VPN (ref), which is just plain wrong. If you download a few gigs, it will slow you down to a few Mbit (if I remember correctly). I even contacted their support about this, and they just said, “They are balancing the servers for the free VPN.” But then why was it fast in the beginning, and if I reconnected to the same server, would it be fast again. Just to be clear: I have no problem with the speed limit/balancing itself, just that they are lying about it.
Proton incentivizing free email accounts to connect to a Gmail account to get 500 MB more storage. (You need to go through the “tutorial” steps to get the 500 MB extra, and one of them is to have a Google Mail account send all their emails to your new Proton inbox.)

This is why I personally decided against Proton.

These are useful data for making decisions about using their service, but not exactly indicative of support for a right wing authoritarian leader who lies more in one day than he has hairs on his entire body.

Edit: typo

Mostly true, that’s why I opened with “I wouldn’t call it writing on the wall.” But for me, it shows that they are not as privacy- and consumer-focused as they like to present themselves. Supporting Trump is just five steps further in this direction. (That’s just how I feel about it.)

that’s why I opened with “I wouldn’t call it writing on the wall.”

Damn; you’re right. My bad. I somehow missed your opener saying exactly the opposite of what you were saying.

Everything you said is true and verifiable, and worth considering when you decide which service to use. It’s a lot of reasons to favor the .onion/tor version of their service to limit what they have access to depending on your privacy stance.

They are indicative of opportunism and greed, which is exactly in line with preemptively sucking up to a future dictator.

Woah… an actually rock-solid account of problems with Proton! Nicely done.

This contrasts with the incoherent conspiracy theory spaghetti that has sometimes been trotted out to make the case against them.

1,2 and 3 are completely irrelevant. 1 is completely normal, 2 missed the point that the wallet (which I don’t use, I never owned crypto) has nothing to do with privacy and 4 is an optional marketing strategy to incentivise migration from google. Nothing is wrong with any of this.

This is interesting. I’m current using btguard, but was thinking about other vpn providers. I have a free protonmail email account and was wondering about their vpn service. Sounds like they are not so privacy oriented. And I assume NordVPN is a similar story?

Well, I’d say Proton is still better than most other options (open-source software, no ad trackers on the website and in apps). However, specifically for VPNs, I would recommend Mullvad or IVPN. If you are a bit more tech-savvy, you may also take a look at Cryptostorm. Of all three, only Mullvad is police-raid-proven to not store logs or other PII. The most important thing for me personally would be that the VPN company is not owned by a larger parent company, which in turn owns multiple different VPN providers. This alone excludes a lot of the heavily advertised providers (Private Internet Access, NordVPN, Surfshark, ExpressVPN, CyberGhost, OVPN, and probably a few more).

What did you go with out of curiosity?

Drive - Selfhosted Nextcloud

Email - Posteo/Tuta

VPN - Cryptostorm (IVPN/Mullvad are more user friendly)

Passwords - Keepass (Sync over my Nextcloud.)

Yea! I’m interested, I did not see that coming…

They’ve been cooperating with law enforcement and handing data to the cops proactively since 2021.

Pay attention.

What do you mean with “proactively”?

Is this what you’re referring to?

The proactive part is when they shut your account down and report it to the cops but yeah, the cooperating with interpol by providing data that they claimed they didn’t keep is damning.

Where do they claim they don’t collect this information?

And then we have the communists making Lemmy. Is there any moderate developers lol. Valve is the only big company I can think of that isn’t annoying. All the faceless Linux devs are good too

Glances at the child gambling enabled by the steam marketplace, an issue being blatantly ignored by Valve leadership.

Buddy, I don’t know how to tell you this. I love Valve for all the good they do, but they got some serious skeletons, too.

Valve representatives were asked point blank if the third party gambling sites have a positive influence on their bottom line, and the dude replying sweated bullets for several seconds before nervously going “we… don’t have any data on that” while the rest stared daggers at him.

Coffeezilla has a recent video on the situation.

I love Steam, but thinking about switching to gog over this. Anybody have any ideas how we can let valve know this isn’t okay?

I mean I always use GoG, if given the option. But there’s almost always no GoG option. Publishers want some form of DRM.

I did this years ago and have like 500 games on GOG. Ended up going back to Steam due to features that gog just doesn’t have. Sigh.

I have a feeling I would feel the same. Its nice having everything in one place. What was missing for you?

All the social features, the workshop, easy browsing, and guides just off the top of my head. GOG is still good for those really retro 90s and early 2000s games though

I understand your frustration but I’m not casting some wide net here. I’m simply talking about political ideologies being in your face.

Link to whatever you’re talking about?

The timestamp in the coffeezilla video.

Watch the whole thing for more detail.

If it’s between fascism and communism, the answer is pretty fucking simple imo. Only one of those ideologies considers all people to be equal.

And no, I am not a communist, and I would not choose communism unless it was the only alternative to fascism.

Totally understand what you’re saying. Obviously I am on Lemmy. Just wish we didn’t have ideologies in our face all the time

I fear for what will happen to valve when Gabr step down in the future

I have a bigger fear of what happens to Linux when Torvalds retires. He took a break a while back, and it was an absolute shit show of a power struggle.

Give some credit. Even if they aren’t politically aligned with your, they did make Lemmy open source for others to run with.

fuck off booooooot licker

The fuck are you on about?

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