Proton Mail says it’s “politically neutral” while praising Republican Party
Proton Mail says it’s “politically neutral” while praising Republican Party
The “privacy-first” company surprised its user base when CEO Andy Yen lauded Trump on social media.
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.
You're viewing a single thread.
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.
Why PIA? They're manipulating people. Its owned by same company as express vpn, cyberghost and zenmate
Not to mention their terrible pricing policy
Oof I forgot about that, you also reminfed me about a post that I can't seem to find anymore of a user fiscovering that they were connected to a US military base.
PrivateVPN is what I use. No ties to the big VPN corporations known, pretty open about their stuff, decent price, small company, port forwarding over OVPN (not wireguard) and no-log policy.
The problem is I don't think they have ever been audited but also because they are obscure enough, I don't know if there are any watchdogs for them turning over info to authorities.
Is PrivateVPN the same as PrivateVPNAccess?
No%
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.
yeah, I myself was already getting a little uncomfortable with how far proton was branching out. It's a good thing that I was already making a transition to using my own domain using aliases through eforw.com
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.
It is not that bad. I have been running my own mail server for 20 years and i generally don't have more problems with it than users of 'big and known' mail server do (it is not like GMail is perfect). And when there are problems I am usually able to tell what happened.
But this does not mean I would recommend self-hosting mail server to everybody. I am an expert, have been doing this professionaly for years. And it is an ongoing fight. It is not like I set it up in 2000 and it has been working since then without changes or incidents.
I was doing it for a while and it usually worked, but the thing is you need email to always work. I've since moved to paying Migadu to host my email.
Do you send mail directly from your server, or do you use some intermediary?
I will admit I did not try it myself but I was under the impression it was pretty bad with the spam filters.
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
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.
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
Check out the comment on this post by @pulsewidth, it provides some interesting perspective on this.Rescinded! Thanks for the context folks
No, make sure you read the top response to that comment. Pulsewidth omitted the original post by the CEO. Not only that, this was Pulsewidth's first post. Not concrete proof of astroturfing, but it's pretty sus
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