Privacy

This article is about Proton VPN, not Proton Mail. Proton is the parent company, but because of the way the technologies work, there's different considerations you would need to make, especially if you're an activist on a government's shitlist.

Mail has to store data like where a message came from and who is the recipient. Doesn't matter if the rest of the message is encrypted, and a government might find that to be enough to abuse someone.

A VPN, however, can drop a given connection's endpoint data the millisecond it's not needed. This is basically how no-log VPNs work.

I don't use Proton, but given that Chat Control is now the law of the land in the EU, the options for a "safe" VPN are getting ever smaller as authoritarianism threatens to break cryptography and privacy in a vain effort to "protect the children."

As I said, it’s still the least bad provider. As for VPNs, I definitely won’t name my provider (it doesn’t have to be public), but before I’d use Proton VPN, I’d rather go with Mullvad. Rent a VPS outside the 5/9/14 Eyes alliance and set up a vpn there yourself, etc. Combine all of this with I2P or Tor. Encrypt emails separately with PGP.

But it's 2026... Western countries are already taking action against all of that anyway.