this post was submitted on 04 Oct 2025
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I'm thinking about paying for a VPN, I currently don't use one.

I'd like to use Mullvad but they don't seem to have regional prices, while Proton does.

I wonder if Proton is still a reliable option, Proton is 60% cheaper in my country, probably because regional pricing (but I didn't check if it's really the case).

If anyone has any other suggestion I'd like to hear it.

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[–] AlecSadler@lemmy.blahaj.zone 67 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Proton's CEO sucks. I canceled my extremely low-priced, grandfathered subscription and moved elsewhere. I had been a user since basically day one, a subscriber since available, and converted family members and friends to it. Not anymore.

Mullvad has been stellar. Fast, anonymous, easy to use. Zero complaints.

[–] pineapplelover@lemmy.dbzer0.com 0 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Damn, I couldn't let go of my extremely-low priced grandfathered subscription. I contemplated about it and getting both mullvad and tuta but it ads up more than what I pay proton.

Also, I believe proton ceo apologized or something like that

[–] AlecSadler@lemmy.blahaj.zone 8 points 1 day ago (1 children)

The apology kind of felt like a "sorry you're offended".

I don't fault anyone for staying but I definitely don't champion them anymore. I did move to Tuta as well and it is far from as seamless of an experience - it does everything I need (including domain aliases), but it was much less intuitive to configure. The system is way slower with search (it doesn't index anything for privacy reasons) and in similar vein the mobile app only syncs something when opened. So you'll get a notification for a new email but when you open it doesn't load for 2-8 seconds.

I get it all somewhat because they're only syncing what's needed at any point in time and decrypting it or whatever, but it does feel janky.

[–] pineapplelover@lemmy.dbzer0.com 19 points 1 day ago (3 children)

I read this article and it certainly is something to consider.

It talks about how Andy Yen was just pointing out how under Trump's first admin, they started to actually attack big tech when dems haven't done anything. Which is true. He praises Gail Slater and Lina Khan (but Lina Khan was recently fired...sooooo).

They clarified how the andy1011000 (andy88) username probably is more about how Andy's birthday was in 1988 and 88 is a lucky number in Taiwan, unlikely that he's a white supremacist.

They also traced the money of Proton's donations and none of the organizations were republican, and pretty much all of the donations align with the practices of Democrat donors.

Andy has a history of posting online supporting Ukraine, being against xenophobia, against racism, supporting women in tech, supporting refugees receive education in Switzerland.

When the Democrat party had proposals for regulatory efforts, Andy supported them.

https://proton.me/blog/congress-antitrust-report

He even made a tweet and blog post talking about the tech surveillance underneath the Trump administration and how people should fear it.

So it seems to be that Andy is more liberal when donating money and publicly acknowledge whoever is in support of anti-trust and anti-surveillance to me.

If it's the goal of Proton to seem neutral, then they maybe did it a little too well. They convinced people that Andy is a full on fascist when in reality, he seems better than democrat politicians we have nowadays.

[–] lastweakness@lemmy.world 11 points 1 day ago

Yeah, all the Proton hate we're seeing are overreactions. But life is easier when you can see everything as black and white when things are actually more nuanced.

[–] BlameTheAntifa@lemmy.world 3 points 1 day ago (1 children)
[–] pineapplelover@lemmy.dbzer0.com 9 points 23 hours ago

From what I gather these are about the IP Logging, deanonymizing user, and having accounts on temporary suspension.

You could search it why on your own or even read the articles you just cited but basically.

  • Apparently the user broke swiss law and "Proton must comply with Swiss law. As soon as a crime is committed, privacy protections can be suspended". However, if the user used VPN, they could've gotten away with this tbh. Emails are encrypted so the only thing they got going for them was the IP address, and that was the weak point.
  • For the deanonymized user, their recovery email was an iCloud email. You don't need to use a recovery email, it's an option that the user chose.
  • Proton received an alert from CERT, saying that these users were linked to a North Korean APT group. But they couldn't verify (as they can't read encrypted emails), so they did the safe thing and temporary suspended them until they receiver further confirmation.

It seems everything they did was to comply with the laws and 2 of these situations could've been easily avoided by the user. The third case just put their accounts in suspension for some further review.

[–] AlecSadler@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 points 20 hours ago (1 children)

Then why did they take the comments to double and triple and quadruple down after the initial issue?

Unlike Ladybird, which is undeniably shit - I won't judge someone for using Proton. I realize people's takeaways from the situation are different. I've been fine without it.

[–] pathief@lemmy.world 2 points 20 hours ago

Why are you hating on Ladybird when its not even in alpha stage?