Andy Yen’s values are incompatible with Proton’s mission. He advocates for poor security practices, supports fascists, and he verbally abuses his subordinates. As such, I can no longer in good conscience continue to financially support a company with such terrible leadership.
Unfortunately for me, my subscription just renewed last month on a multi year plan, but it does give me time to browse for and experiment with alternatives.
If you’re able, I encourage you to do the same and cite Andy Yen as the driving factor for your decision. We can’t let these tech bro fascists destroy what little semblance of privacy we have left.
I’m sure in a few days we’re going to hear about an all hands or internal memo where Andy apologizes for his “poor communication” and how hes “committed to being a better leader by being a better communicatortm”
But how he communicates - his tone, his word choice, his inflection - is just an indictment of his character. I honestly don’t give a fuck about the kind of person he is. Mostly because selfishly, I don’t have to.
The main issue is his ideas. The things he’s advocating for are fundamentally incompatible with a business whos only two value propositions are privacy and security.
A.I. is surveillance tech. Period. Every interaction, from keystroke to window focus, is meticulously categorized, logged, and sent back to to a handful of people like Andy Yen; Who then use it to draw conclusions that reaffirm their own cognitive biases. Its a doom-loop for C-level execs that suffer from main character syndrome. Because surely, the only reason the company is successful at all is because of the CEOs hard work and business acumen and any perceived failures come from those lazy engineers that only think about going slow. Like losers.
Im not the biggest fan of A.I. but theres a huge difference between asking it to help spot a difficult bug and using it to spy on your subordinates and determine their individual productivity rankings.
Like, that guy seriously can’t be in charge of the privacy company. We’re fucked.
“Every interaction”? Starting when…?
Starting from the first one.
Talk is cheap, things won’t change while Andy is at the helm.
This is what I wanted to see. A blanket bullshit “excuse” apologizing for nothing and trying to make this about AI instead of him being an asshole.
This proves they are not willing to replace him even for these serious offenses. I will be cancelling my subsription today.
I didn’t give them money, so unfortunately I can’t give less than nothing.
You’ve done all you can.
Except, if you’re ever in their area, you could try to get a tour and steal someone’s pens.
Paper clips, Scotch tape, post-it notes are also great targets. just saying.
Oh and don’t forget sharpies!
I honestly thought the CEO is a fascist is old news? I’ve been wondering for awhile why Lemmy seems to have forgotten this, despite the fact that it was Lemmy that raised the issue about Andy.
On Lemmy first? Where would that be?
It was a long time ago when he posted supporting Trump on a social media post.
I become more and more weary about the absolutist moralizing. Yeah this CEO is nutty, but what I want from him is to protect the privacy of his customers. That is a precious good to us.
I especially mistrust the fuckai fanatics who want to burn down everything and everyone that has remotely to with AI no matter if it’s reasonable or unreasonable. Their tactics are despicable and their strategy leads to unproductive outcomes for all.
Soon there will be no big VPN and privacy companies left and it will be easy to mop up what is left without resistance.
He’s pushing slop code, ignoring complaints from Proton’s own security team.
Proton customer’s privacy is fucked. It may take some time, but they’re fucked.
Sooo… what VPNs do y’all like
AirVPN
Mullvad. Cheapest one I know, works perfect, is simple and apparently so far there are no controversies.
Oh come on. Now I need an alternative. :(
I’ve heard iVPN is supposed to be good. Haven’t heard anything bad about that one. At least not yet.
Sounds awesome. I’ll try it, thank you!
had to move on from mullvad for port forwarding, but it was solid.
iVPN is supposed to be good.
I switched from Proton to Tuta a while ago, then realized they both suck for the same reason—walled garden.
Airvpn is a reliable option for torrenting in my experience.
Mailbox.org is a great option for mail, based in Germany. They have some things included other than mail, including a drive.
Name me a VPN that is comparable to Proton and I’ll move to that and Tutamail in a heartbeat.
IVPN, Windscribe VPN, Obscura VPN, Air VPN
If you’re leaving proton because of their AI use, Windscribe is a bad alternative. You can’t even directly reach their customer support anymore, you have to go through their AI and it decides if it’s worth getting a human involved. Yes, even for paying customers.
If you raise the issue on their subreddit, the CEO encourages you to resign.
Good to know about Windscribe, one less company to research, solely for the poor support. I’m leaning more towards IVPN anyways because they have some add-on features that I’m interested in.
I’m not a purist, I don’t expect everything to be AI free, that’s just unrealistic unfortunately. It’s a shame though because it’s built off of the theft of open source work. My issue is Andy being a fascist, being verbally abusive to his employees, sacrificing security for speed, all for the sake of saving a few dollars.
Thank you. Checking these out.
They don’t have as many access points.
Really!!! I switched to proton mail for jobs. Fuck!!!
I had 2 AI gen companies (someone insisted I gen images and I just folded under pressure, idk why they want AI) switch from a 5 day test plan, to suddenly taking a good total of 30$ by forcing me on a monthly plan.
Be aware of those scams.
That is enough to put me in the red, I don’t know how it is legal.
One of them is OpenAI itself.
Why even use that shit in the first place. But yeah, spread the word. Fuck them.
Yeah, that’s very unfortunate. I just recently moved everything over to proton and I’ll be spending today looking for yet another alternative.
Please do share what alternative(s) you end up with and what you like about the providers. I had a look at mailbox, infomaniak and tuta for mail and airvpn as a replacement. I think I’l be switching to mailbox.
I signed up for tuta right now and I’m currently moving my most sensitive accounts over but I think I’m going to go with mailbox as well. It sounds good for around $13.50 usd.
I’m going to check them (mailbox) out first once I wake up a bit more. I already know I can’t afford tuta on top of everything else I pay for currently. Budget is about stretched to the max but I will update with which one I go with.
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I don’t know, the terms and conditions say that after a year of closing your account, they may give your email address to someone else. That sounds like a privacy disaster waiting to happen.
After briefly skimming their privacy policy and features, gmx doesn’t seem too bad. I’ll do a little more research tomorrow and its on the list.
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For email, have you considered Mailfence, Posteo.de, Fastmail
or Disroot?Disroot is currently not operational due to a server failure
I’ve been using Startmail for a while now with no complaints
I’ve been happy with infomaniak. If you host a domain name with them, you get a free email too. I switched from Godaddy, gmail, and protonmail earlier this year all to infomaniak.
I’m also happy with AirVPN, but a lot more sites block it than other VPNs, so be ready to deal with that.
But Infomaniak is an entirely different product to Protonmail.
They offer email hosting and kSuite. It’s an alternative and more.
Protonmail is end to end encrypted. Infomaniak can be decrypted. It’s a less secure product and therefore not an alternative to Protonmail
But I agree that it’s a good product compared to like gmail.
Fair point. I think protonmail is only that way with other protonmail users, and I practically never send personal emails, so I honestly forgot about that feature. It’d be nice if other hosts could integrate with that.
I’m unaware of true feature parity alternatives then. I guess I just tend to use other communication media when I need encryption.
i finally deleted my ~20 year google account last week, finally migrating every single account that used that old email over to proton. and now, this
It’s still astronomically better than Google. People seem to be forgetting this.
True for now. But it seems headed down a path where it will be competing with Google in shittiness some time in the not so far off future (and I use Proton as well).
It’s not better.
It’s fine, at best, and free alternatives are fine too.
The only thing Proton has is their integrity and focus on privacy… Or was supposed to, anyway.
It is. The direction they are going is shit, but only in isolation, if you compare it to Google, they still look like angels. Perhaps you dont understand what Google is doing.
No, you’re the one that refuses to see where Proton is heading with a CEO like that.
The only reason I’m paying for Proton is their supposed values, but clearly under his leadership they’re completely opposite to what they claim publicly.
If Proton is going to use my money to push out slop, I might as well use any other email provider that at least won’t lie to my face about it.
This. The Proton suite is very convenient in my use case, I wouldn’t like to switch to all saperate services
Better than Google in terms of ethics and privacy maybe, and not shoving ads in your face when you don’t use an adblocker. But it’s behind in features.
And unfortunately Google caters to the majority, who generally don’t care about privacy, even the ones who say they do but refuse to act on their words (and I’m not even going to comment on the “they have all my info anyway” crowd).
To me comparing Gmail to Protonmail feels similar to comparing FB Messenger to Signal. The former has more features and therefore is chosen by most people despite the enshittification.
I deleted mine several years ago but my employer just added Google dependencies to their app so I can’t install through Aurora anymore and have to go and buy a new phone and a SIM card, and make a new Google account…
I have yet to delete my gmail account but I soon will make a new one to run on my phone until I can get a new phone with grapheneos or some other OS that uses microg instead. I feel you on that 20 year account thing though. I think I made mine about 20 years ago as well. It was my very first “grown up” email after my silly kid named ones like Skaterpunkxxxxx@aol and such.
Fuck! Me too…
When people show you who they are, listen.
There was a lot of copium flying around after the first red flag. I told people then, best case scenario is he’s a naive idiot to think a Trump cabinet pick is good for anyone other than Trump and his cronies. Worst case scenario he was trying to cosy up to an anti-democratic fascist.
Here we are with red flag
23. How many people are going to keep injecting that copium? Or are we finally listening to the man when he tries to show us who he is?Edit: I was unaware Proton got caught sponsoring Fascists on YouTube.
Emphasis: listen the first time.
And this is red flag number 3. Don’t forget about Proton sponsoring fascist Youtubers.
This isn’t a red flag, it’s a red banner parade, holy shit
You’re right, this is “why did you make me do that” level of warning.
I did this the first time he praised Trump’s cabinet picks.
I canceled my renewal at that time but had just reupped for two years. I was hoping the foundation board would do its job and reprimand him if not oust. Their inaction and silence has been the most disappointing part of this and the real reason I’m following through on ending my 10+ year account with them.
Exact same. Mine had also just renewed for two years. I cancelled the renewal but hoped sometime in the last two years things would have improved. I’ll be losing that in January along with the more than half a tb of drive space I had racked up for being a long time customer.
They’ve got 28 days to oust Yen and make a really good PR statement or I’m gone for good. This damage control by Yen isn’t cutting it.
I had missed that and that’s a failure on my part.
I also cited him back then. Interesting to pay attention to reddit comments but not to your own cancelling subscribers.
Yeah I told them exactly why I was leaving in my cancelation, and I never heard anything back from anyone there.
What Email provider do you use now if I may ask? Do you use password managers and/or VPNs? If so where did you switch to? Because when I look at alternatives it’s damn bleak out there.
I use Fastmail now. I know it doesn’t have the encryption that Protonmail has (what does, aside from Tuta anyway?), but the alias feature is great and integrates directly with 1Password (my PW manager). I chose 1P due to a blog post by Troy whatshisname a few years back and have been happy with it since. I have 15 days left on my Mullvad VPN sub, and I honestly don’t know what I’ll switch to once that’s over (since apparently that CEO is a fascist too).
It certainly is bleak out there. I self-host quite a few services, and I used to roll my own VPN, so I might just do that again.
Heyyy, sorry to bring more bad news. But 1Password is also a fascist company. They donated money to DHH through Omarchy, and the CEO is already known for not being cool.
It’s a shame, because I liked the keyboard navigation on their password manager.
Fuuuuck. This is exhausting. I was already salty about having to move my VPN but changing password managers means migrating my family too. So annoying. Any recs for ethical and good VPN and PW management?
Sadly I’m still looking for alternatives on the VPN front.
As a password manager I use KeePassXC and keep the password file synced between computers using rsync. But the KeePassXC dev is also vibe coding parts of it now, and I’ve heard the same about the rsync dev. I’d still rather stay on vibe coded software instead of vibe coded and fascist supporting software, but I’m looking for alternatives.
My recommendation is that you stop doing that.
The tools you’re using to stay private and secure online need to be chosen for functionality first and foremost. Do not be driven away from effective tools by controversy.
There is no ethical consumption under capitalism.
JFC. That one will take longer to switch away from.
Get something offline-by-default like KeePass, and then if you want to you can backup/sync the database file with whatever cloud storage provider of your choosing
I’ve tried that before (KeepassXC) and the lack of convenience is not worth the added security to me. I totally understand why people would make that choice though.
I had just swapped over to proton at the time so I didn’t want to go through that again but if both ethics and security aren’t priorities then I’m out I’ll probably just self host half the replacement services on my VPS anyway.
…and when that (or any) archive.org link returns
429 Too Many Requestsbecause of your VPN, pull it up in Tor Browser. Bless 'em for still allowing Tor exits, fuck 'em for blocking VPNs.Holy hell… I was expecting it to be something AI related but Yen is straight up acting like a Musk wannabe. And I was seriously considering a switch to Proton but I think I’m going to bin that idea now
I cant believe yens henchman is named bart butler lol
Proton is fucked if this article is true, andy is so obviously trying to chase profits in a market that isnt in line with protons core, and there doesnt seem to be anyone with enough company power that is willing to stop his psychosis
He would fit in better with company culture at instagram or tiktok
Does this count or is was this too aggressive? I’ve been known to be a little too angry when it comes to things like this.
On line 4 you opened quotation marks at ‘"re-interviewing’ but never closed them. For that reason, I am afraid it is a failure and must be re-written.
Ahh shit
It feels pretty balanced, to me. Nicely done.
