this post was submitted on 08 Aug 2026
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Privacy
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dont they have a bad rep..? i feel like ive heard that they're like the worst of the privacy services, but thats atleast better than google π€·ββοΈ
I have yet to see anything that scares me. That being said, it's significantly better than Google no matter what way you look at it.
Sort of, but it isnβt in my view very well deserved. There is certainly quite a bit of FUD here in the fediverse, but sometimes it feels manufactured.
The CEO has made, and partially walked back, some statements favoring right wing groups, but it was mostly antitrust stuff, so I think it is mostly rich person doing rich person things.
But they claim to be politically neutral, and they are a Swiss company which already puts it in a tier above anything hosted in many other western countries.
The services themselves are technically very well done, and the applications for using them are also very good. They have a new drive cli which is good. The password manager is great. VPN is good too. The mail bridge they provide is also very good if you want to use third party mail apps but with the benefit of their encryption.
There are other services that compete strongly on each of those and more, but I donβt think any do when considering the full suite.
yeah i was looking for a vpn inside the eu/efta and couldn't find a better alternative so i went with proton and have been very satisfied so far
bought the 2 year package, no regrets. at least not yet. if they sponsor another far right influencer i might have to switch to something else after my subscription ends
for e-mail im gonna do something different tho, dont wanna have all my eggs in one basket. but it's completely fine if some prefer that for the convenience :)
edit: e-mail, not mail
gotcha thanks!!
The tech is good. But the pushing of encryption in email services disables the use of other mail clients on free accounts (where the bridge doesn't work), while the encryption is useless when communicating with any other mail service (with email you mostly communicate with corpos anyway). It just seems like it's a cash grab, but it might be useful for activist groups.
I'm still looking for a free (at least as much as it can be), private and open email service which is way harder than I expected.
I have a protonmail ACC (not using it as I need a powerful mail client, Infomaniak (very capitalist lately), which I also don't use much.
Not at all. They've gotten some flack for turning over some data to authorities after they were legally compelled, which is something any company will either do or cease to exist. They also got some flack for some dumb statements by the CEO but those don't affect your privacy.
ahh gotcha thanks
The rep is from a post sort of in support of a policy of the current US.
As for privacy, they comply with subpoenas when they have to (and they publish the numbers), but as they use E2E they cant decrypt anything of yours on their servers
and also because they sponsored a far-right influencer.
they promised not to do that again tho and said that it was a mistake so it should be fine
i guess its fine then
You'll see endless people repeating the same lines here that Andy Yen (proton ceo) is a trump supporter or something but he has already apologized for his tweet that praised some antitrust policies that was done by the republican party and specifically the FTC chair at the time. Additionally, finances show that they're pretty on the left. Proton's PR is so good I guess that when they try to appear to be neutral, the left finds them far right, when in reality they're more to the left than people realize.