Just sitting here waiting on the peeps who know more about stuff to chime in on this, cause it sounds awesome. But I’ve been burned before so I’m hesitant
Seems solid.
It doesn’t change a ton, but the point was basically them putting their money where their mouth is and saying “now we can’t sell out like everything else.”
If you liked them before, this is great. It means google or whoever literally can’t buy them out, it’s not about the money. If you were iffy already because they’re not FOSS or whatever other reason, this doesn’t change that, either, for better or worse
What is this buying out talked about something not escapable if not some legal reorganization is made? It has been being talked about other companies, too, and it sounds like if you have a form of a company, you can’t legally refuse monetary offers from someone to buy your company.
Is there such a legal mechanism that forces an owner to sell out if an offer is made, or is this more about proofing a company against CEO/shareholder personal sell out decision?
A company with a public offering basically cannot refuse a large enough buyout because with a public offering comes a financial responsibility to the shareholders. Public stock is a contract saying give me money and I’ll do my best to make you money back, and it’s very legally binding.
You can avoid this by never going public, but that also means you basically don’t get big investors for expanding what you can offer. A public offering involves losing some of your rights as owner for cash.
When the legal goal becomes “money above all else”, it is hard to justify NOT selling all the data and violating the trust of your customers for money, customer loyalty has to be monetizable and also worth more.
Proton has given a majority share to a nonprofit with a legal requirement to uphold the current values, not make money. This means that the remaining ownership can be sold to whoever, the only way anything gets done is if this foundation agrees. It prevents everything associated with a legal financial responsibility to make money, but still allows the business to do business things and make money, which seems to be proton’s founder’s belief, that the software should be sold to be sustainable.
I think a publicly traded company works that way as they have a fiduciary duty to the shareholders to make money, but the non-profit (controlling) part of proton has no such duty as their primary directive is their mission. They said I’m mostly talking out of my ass so I certainly could be wrong
Maybe the founders can’t sell out anymore, but looking at what Raspberrypi just did the company can still end up partially on the stock market.
It’s a bit different because of the stated values though.
Raspberry pi’s foundation is focused on making computers available broadly, while this new organization is focused on making privacy widely accessible.
While both can be commercialized, the pi’s foundation has no fundamental problems with selling out privacy or focusing on money to achieve those goals. Proton would have a much harder time arguing that profiting from sale.of private data supports privacy.
This is relevant because it means even if the remaining shares end up on the stock market, the foundation can use its majority ownership to veto any privacy concerns.
Time will tell. I could also have missed something
Seems legit. Going towards a better business model. Don’t know if anything stops them going from non-profit to profit as OpenAI did buy at least their movinf the other way now with intent towards the opposite.
I’ll keep using their service at least.
Don’t know if anything stops them going from non-profit to profit as OpenAI
Don’t know about other countries but that’s illegal in the US and not what happened.
Much like Mozilla and RPi, they have a for-profit and a non-profit arm.
Seems like all that will change is the fact that all profits made will be reinvested in the company, im not an expert though, so i may be wrong
In this world of enshittification and organizations becoming more and more aggressive, it’s so nice and refreshing to see proton doing the opposite and moving to a better model :)
Proton and Mullvad leading the way
Can you explain how or why is the Mullvad VPN better for privacy than Proton’s?
Mullvad is proven. Not that proton is not, but there were a few controversies about their operations.
Mullvad is accepting payments with actual private crypto currencies. Mullvad had authorities visit their operations site, demanding data and left empty handed as they did not have anything to offer. The same cannot be said for proton. I personally like that they do not offer free services and that they are advocating for privacy through ads and foss projects like the mullvad browser.
Proton is only publishing on f-droid, their vpn and recently their pass application. They have yet to provide notification services for de-googled devices after years of community demands. They have opt out telemetry.(except the proton pass through f-droid.) while mullvad does not, correct me if I am wrong on this.
Since you asked about the VPN, everything mullvad is running is on ram so nothing is saved. (I think this is only for their owned servers though not all of them.)
That being said, I use the proton suite as there is no other alternative right now and the casual user in me is satisfied. :)
Proton requires an account, which gives them some of your info, while Mullvad does not, giving you an anonymous account number instead.
If Proton really doesn’t log VPN traffic, then it doesn’t really matter. But since Mullvad does not have that same personal info, they would be unable to provide law enforcement or 3rd party data brokers any hard data aside from your IP if they wanted to.
This makes me want to upgrade my plan.
I’ve got the unlimited plan and it’s well worth the money. Simplelogin integration is great.
I wish the forwarding with email aliases would function a bit differently. Right now the alias is set as the recipient in the email and I wish you could set the recipient email to whatever email you want (like one of the additional emails you can set in Proton Mail) because the way it is now it makes my general filters useless and I would have to add even more filters.
Edit: I created a suggestions on their feedback site here: https://protonmail.uservoice.com/forums/953584-proton-pass/suggestions/48496442-show-use-forwards-to-email-as-recipient-in-forwa if anyone cares to vote for it.
That’s a good point - voting for it!
For my purposes I have a second proton email for things I may want to keep credentials for which I filter out, and the simple logins are almost always complete burners so I end up deleting half of them anyway. The moment I start getting unwanted spam I touch the simple login accounts and start making new ones.
As someone with many hobbies I get things from all sorts of sites so it’s just kind of necessary if I don’t want to drown in spam lol
I don’t use proton but I feel like when people email me from simple login alias emails, it breaks encryption.
Why is that? Genuinely asking, you clearly know more about this than I do.
I upgraded mine but haven’t talked to the wife about including her yet because the family plan is for up to 6 so it’d be cheaper to just buy two individual subscriptions, she doesn’t really care enough to justify that much extra cost. Hopefully Proton adds another plan or two for groups!
Support the apps that protect you. I recommend Signal and Proton VPN.
At my school, mullvad is one of the only VPNs that work since basically every port is blocked except ports 80 and 443 using TCP. Mullvad can use wireguard over TCP on 443, which is very useful.
I hear Mullvad is great but my problem with it is it doesn’t support port forwarding (ProtonVPN is pretty much the only one in the market AFAIK that does).
Not so much a problem if you have high up speeds (like with fiber) or don’t do a lot of torrenting (or are an asshole and torrent without seeding), but I don’t have fiber and have a max up speed of like 15–20 Mb/s.
This was literally the one thing that made me pick proton over mullvad. I know I’m not exactly alone in this, but inbound traffic does matter.
