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.
Tuta for mail, bitwarden for passwords, mullvad for vpn. You lose port forwarding.
I migrated last week. I dont miss proton.
There are other good VPN options that provide port forwarding but it’s usually at an extra cost or absolutely tedious to set up.
AirVPN, Windscribe, and another one I can’t remember. Personally I prefer the security and privacy of Mullvad but I use proton’s port forwarding and proton mail for quite a bit so the transition is gonna be annyoing…
EDIT: Removed PIA due to dubious behavior.
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.
I’ll be as weird as I want. My trust in them has been eroded and that is a major concern to me when picking a company to keep my data private. In the future consider staying out of the conversation if you have nothing of value to add.
Tbh I think proton is solid. What the CEO said is just stating a fact of the situation 10 years ago and linking it to now. I don’t believe that’s right but he posted the message 4th of December which (if I’m not mistaken) was before it was clear all the tech CEOs were sucking his dick like we saw around his in inauguration.
I’d still recommend it, the other stuff the CEO says on twitter is all very logical and positive for privacy and against big tech. Unfortunately someone says something that is remotely questionable (not like this guy has outright praised Trump far as I can tell) and sudetly Proton is a dead service not considering all the good they have done and will (probably) continue to do
I see how moving out of the Google ecosystem could be a pain, but moving out of proton probably shouldn’t be that big of a deal?
Switching to another services for calendar, storage, or VPN should be simple. I kind of see how going to another email provider and not wanting to lose old conversations could be a pain though. In fact, that pain is what largely made me try to avoid using email for communicating with people in my life.
Either way, much less of a pain than buying a semi-luxury car only to see it lose basically all of its value because Elon is a nazi.
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.
I understand the concern but it’s not like the CEO is sieg heiling… He is stating how things used to be and his hope that Trump will continue that trend. He posted 4th of December which was far before Trump got all his big tech chronies to sit Infront of US allies at his inauguration
