Privacy

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Help Me Understand The Proton Hate... (lemmy.ml)

submitted 1 day ago by pyramidengine@lemmy.ml to c/privacy@lemmy.ml

71 comments fedilink hide all child comments

I've been a paid Proton Unlimited customer for several years now and aside from a few small complaints, I'm generally very happy with the services I'm paying for. I agree that there is too much focus on "sidequests" like Wallet and Meet before core products are fully rebuilt and meeting expectations. I agree that Linux versions and some feature implementations are taking a long time. However, I have a fully functioning suite of Mail, Drive, VPN, Calendar and more that meet 95% of my needs. To be fair, I'm sure the zero-access/zero-knowledge encryption aspect makes development much more difficult.

If you're worried about political affiliations/interests, I'll give you that Andy Yen has made a few worrisome comments. I'm not sure what to do there. Assuming there aren't repeat occurrences, I'm satisfied with their statement about the French political figure sponsorship.

If it's the FBI cases and subpoenas, it comes down to understanding the difference between privacy and anonymity, and knowing what strategy is required to achieve actual anonymity.

So why (especially on Lemmy) is there so much Proton hate/relunctancy? Eager to hear some non-biased, fact-driven thoughts here!

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[–] boring_bohr@feddit.org 4 points 19 hours ago (2 children)

Correct me if I'm wrong, but, regarding the first point, in what way are the calendar clients proprietary? Unless I am missing something, the clients for iOS and Android are open source and licensed under GPLv3 while the desktop client (part of the mail app) appears to be licensed under AGPL v3.

The email system not working with Thunderbird etc. out-of-the-box is true but that is kind of understandable, considering that the emails are only stored and transmitted to the first-party clients in an encrypted form that other clients couldn't work with? And you could use the mail bridge (which is also open source, if I am not mistaken) to expose them as a local server to be used by Thunderbird etc., right? Maybe not ideal but I'd agrue it's "fine".

I do agree that there are things to dislike about Proton but those two don't seem like problems in my opinion...

[–] vas@lemmy.ml 1 points 14 hours ago* (last edited 14 hours ago)

Correct me if I’m wrong, but, regarding the first point, in what way are the calendar clients proprietary?

When I say that "their calendar will NOT work with open technologies from F-Droid and such", I mean that their calendar system does not support webdav or similar sync-ing technologies. Actually no single app from F-Droid is compatible with their unpaid service, and their own app is not on F-Droid either. If you pay, it all of a sudden becomes possible, but... see the points above.

Same thing if I want to integrate a calendar from Proton into any other calendar or set of calendars by the way. Which is my use case. In the end, I open some calendars natively in my system, and just that one Proton calendar - separately, detached from the rest of the world.

The email system not working with Thunderbird etc. out-of-the-box is true but that is kind of understandable

I see your point. Though I could imagine at least some form of IMAP access working. For example, there's an *already-existing* technology to automatically encrypt incoming emails with a person's provided public key. This is compatible with the standard IMAP protocol - just encrypt it server-side upon receiving the email.

[–] FineCoatMummy@sh.itjust.works 1 points 18 hours ago

to expose them as a local server to be used by Thunderbird etc., right?

Correct. I do that, to use Thunderbird as my mail app with Proton.