this post was submitted on 15 Jan 2025
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Privacy
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Misinformation. OP is advocating that you shoot yourself in the foot.
The CEO said something silly on Twitter which revealed either that (a) he shares an exceedingly banal opinion with literally half of America or (b) he's not above a bit of preemptive sycophancy to advance his (positive) anti-trust agenda.
There's nothing particularly scandalous in the offending tweet:
Proton is not owned Zuck-like by its CEO. It's controlled by a foundation with other stakeholders on the board, including the inventor of the Web himself. In its niche it is still by far the best option. Ditching it for a nebulous non-existent alternative because the CEO expressed a dumb and extremely commonplace opinion is just silly and self-defeating.
PS: to be clear, OP is peddling misinformation because it's not true that "Proton took the stance" of anything. It's the personal opinion of the CEO that's at issue. It's a major distinction. I find it disappointing that people interested in privacy would have such little respect for a private individual's right to have their own thoughts.
PPS: to be extra clear, my comments are about the post above, not stuff that people are reading elsewhere. But the substance stands. See discussion for detail.
OP is responding to a public post and rationalizing why it's a red line for them. How is that "disinformation"?
Except Proton's official Mastodon account made another post afterwords doubling down on the CEO's comments. They ended up taking down the post due to getting a ton of backlash
Their official reddit account also tripled down by saying "here is our official response" (and then quoting the Mastodon post). So they've explicitly made it the company's view - not just the CEO's view.
The privacy community is always told to verify, not trust. The board of Proton have decided to publicly state something that leads a lot of people to be unable to trust them - namely supporting the choices of an extreme right wing leader who has repeatedly demonstrated the foolishness of trusting anything he says or does.
This CEO is totally free to have their own thoughts but its verging on the ridiculous to think that other people aren't going to have a negative reaction to them and seek alternatives. Its next to impossible to trust a company that express approval of Trump decisions because its impossible to trust Trump. And Proton going out of their way to publicly state their approval when they are not even a US org and would've lost nothing by simply not saying anything suggests a board that was keen to publicly express support for Trump. It inevitably makes people who are already on the receiving end of Trumpian hate legislation, or who soon will be, wonder what else Proton might be willing to do for Trump in the future.
How is it true exactly? Republicans do not care about the little guys in any way lol
No, no it isn't arguably true. It's just flat out incorrect. 100% of people could vote for him or others like him out of fear of disappearing in the night if they don't. That doesn't make him or the party "for the little guy".
It doesn't matter that 51% of the country votes for the Republicans. The party has consistently shit all over "the little guy" and made him eat it for over 40 years, telling him he's eating shit and then said only the party can fix it.
All the while the party's been giving tax money to their friends and saying "don't worry, we're here now. you can feed him as much shit as you want. we'll find someone cleaning up shit and make the "little guy" think that person was making it instead. that way when you get caught doing it no one will believe it"
As a non-American I don't normally care about US politics or what "literally half of America" think but I am concerned with far-right politics spilling over in to my country. So I would naturally want to resist organisations aligning themselves with those politics, whether they are scandalous to Americans or not.
I largely agree with what you’re saying, except the official Proton Mastadon account doubled down on that personal opinion. That seems pretty clear that it’s endorsed not just by that one individual on the board.
Link to Mastodon thread: https://mastodon.social/@protonprivacy/113833073219145503
Archives in case they delete it:
https://web.archive.org/web/20250115165213/https://mastodon.social/@protonprivacy/113833073219145503
https://archive.is/lBQd8
Text copy of their post:
Looks like backing up the post was a good call.
This doesn’t seem bad? Its true dems embraced the corporate side. The republicans suck and are only going after tech until tech bows down to them (like zuck has been doing) but the post isn’t really outrageous or worse than the first tweet
Are you trying to argue that R is less entrenched with rich oligarchs and corporate money than the Dems? Because I musk object if so.
No I’m saying Dems moved to the right and aren’t representing the people who historically have voted for them because they’re chasing the corporate donors and right wingers
Republicans have always been worst and still are.
Well on this specific detail we agree entirely!
Right? So much of this seems like people not able to tell if actions are good or bad independent of who takes the action. There's no way their team could ever do anything bad, and anything done by the other team is automatically bad.
God forbid you try to reinforce a rare good behavior from someone who's also done a lot of horrendous things.
Can you screenshot it? The link doesn’t load
Just puked a little after reading that.
Here’s what I don’t get: if the leadership at Proton believes this shit, why share it on social media at all? It clearly isn’t going to make anyone in the left happy. Are they trying to capture porn-loving MAGA?
Appeasement to the fascists so they don't get banned like they did to tiktok (I assume)
I love how you’re claiming misinformation while posting misinformation. It’s not the CEO, it’s a board member. That said, the company also officially posted these ideas on their Bluesky account.
This isn’t a “CEO” expressing a belief, it’s the board, and now the official company line.
I’m not disagreeing with their post particularly on corporate dems, but this is a company and not a persons sole belief.
Also, if dems are the party of big business then why are all these big businesses donating to Trump? Does that just mean republicans are the party of even bigger business?
Both parties are the big business parties. Big business is “donating” (bribing) Trump now like all big businesses have done to both parties since citizens united passed.
Their bullet points are spin-doctoring.
Also the comment got a few dozen upvotes almost immediately. Suspicious.
I was thinking the same thing. In all the threads about it. It just seemed oddly suspicious and not typical of what the digital privacy community has typically believed… I mean, I’m also not going to homogenize a community like that though and Proton has been a mainstay.
It isn't misinformation.
Someone like this board member being a traitor to his species isn't covered by "opinion". No normalizing nazis. It's such a low bar. He couldn't clear it.
He blasted his treachery over the public airwaves. His privacy isn't being violated.
This whole comment feels like an exercise in using all the best words to miss the point. We know, as does this probably-lying board member, that Republicans are only going to go more authoritarian, and the only reason they would pretend to care about big tech abuses is to grab the steering wheel from them to commit far worse abuses. No company that gets into bed with traitors is going to become the new center of my digital life.
Tuta for email, syncthing for photos bc I'm not self-hosting, mullvad for VPN.
You have to self host if you use synching
They probably mean forwardable ports, i.e. have isp-related problems with hosting servers.
Syncthing doesn't need you to host a server, it can hole-punch right through the worst cgnats.
Might also be intermittent syncing only when ops machine is running.
While true in some scenarios, in anti-trust Lina khan's ftc has done significantly more than trump ever did. Biden keeping her over the protest of countless business execs and daily articles in the wall street journal on how she's ruining America shows some commitment to prosecuting big tech.
Meanwhile, trump's anti-trust moves were mostly based off petty issues he had with the ceos or the platforms having a "liberal bias". Now that every big tech ceo has fallen in line and given him $1 million for his inauguration I doubt we'll see much movement on that front.
From what I remember pre-election news was saying wealthy dems/dem donors wanted Biden (and Kamala in some report I saw) gone primarily because they didn’t like what Lina Khan was doing. There were also questions about whether Kamala would continue to support Lina Khan after receiving donations from wealthy donors. JD Vance praised her work and it sounds like the Trump nomination is going to continue similarly.
I don’t like Trump at all and I know how petty and sycophantic he can be, but this may end up being one case where I end up preferring the result on this one specific issue over what we may have had if the dems had won without Kamala or if she flipped and agreed to drop Khan. I won’t really know how I feel about this selection until I see the result.
(Quick search turned these examples up that I’ve only skimmed, but I need to log off: https://www.politico.com/news/2024/10/24/kamala-harris-lina-khan-00185345 https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/kamala-harris-rich-donors-lina-khan/)
There's no fucking way they let her go on.
I'm ready to eat my words, but I expect her to disappear, or be limited to companies which did not fall in line to Musk/Trump.
The entire shtick of the next admin is deregulation, antitrust will not be welcome.
Completely agree on all that.
YOU POSTED the comment they are rebutting. And your reply to the rebuttal of your own comment is "completely agree?"
Not American, but there is this regarding the third point: https://www.reddit.com/r/ProtonMail/comments/1i1zjgn/comment/m7b1wib/
Any thoughts here?
To me this whole demonizing proton ceo thing seems a bit overblown. Sucking up is actually pathetic and funny