OK I think I will move to Posteo. Great security, privacy focussed, servers in Germany, running with 100% renewable energy. Prices are ok, too. Ticks all boxes.
Privacy
A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.
Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.
In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.
Some Rules
- Posting a link to a website containing tracking isn't great, if contents of the website are behind a paywall maybe copy them into the post
- Don't promote proprietary software
- Try to keep things on topic
- If you have a question, please try searching for previous discussions, maybe it has already been answered
- Reposts are fine, but should have at least a couple of weeks in between so that the post can reach a new audience
- Be nice :)
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much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)
It's super simple and great for pricing its like 1 dollar a month worth it to tick all the positive boxes it does.
I will continue to use Proton and their services, not because I support or endorse any political decisions from the CEO/board members (and I don't), but because they provide open source, secure, and private software that I love.
This is no different than arguing about using GrapheneOS based on the behavior of the maintainers.
In all seriousness, I genuinely feel like the demographics of those making over 250K/year outside of Silicon Valley (proton is from Switzerland which is a center-right country), and outside of the arts industries, is probably bare minimum of lib-center, and probably most likely to be at least fiscally conservative, if not socially as well. Those kind of people are more concerned with maintaining their financial position than the issues plaguing the income classes that the individual has graduated out of.
I donβt think youβre going to find many CEOs that arenβt at least a little right of center or self serving in their business interests.
Getting to the top 1% income bracket is a lot easier than maintaining that financial position.
using services based on the ceo's political leaning instead of actual features and policies of that service? that's dumb, tell me when that political leaning reflects in polices of proton then we can talk
I guess the assumption is that over time they inevitably will have an effect and people want to switch before that happens.
Protonmail has been my main email provider for the past 7 years, and unless its CEO decides to sell it to Trump or Musk I honestly don't see how his stupid private or not so private opinions are worth the hassle of changing my email for the million things I use my main and all the other emails I registered with Protonmail.
Most rich people have very dubious or outright awful political opinions and unless you're rich enough to have someone build you an alternative or deconnected enough from society/only exist in programmer circles and are able to live entirely on FOSS software I don't see why the average user should care about the CEO's political stance. Maybe that's my ignorant opinion as a European, but would you stop using Linux if you found out Linus Torvalds secretly loves Windows? Probably not.
Service =/= Software
Proton could (theoretically) hold your data hostage. Linus Torvalds could not just update linux to inject a maga banner in your desktop, or turn your os into ransomware. Even if your distro maintainer wanted to do that, you still have the final say on whether or not to update (and if you keep up with the news, you can just avoid the update and wait for someone to fork it).
Your analogy/ example is fucked up and beyond stupid. Protonmail is hosted by the organization. Linus has no access to the Linux systems in the world. Also, thousands have contributed to the Linux ecosystem.
I agree that my analogy is fucked up and a little stupid, but I was just applying OPs logic: Andy Yen doesn't do any more for Proton than Linus Torvalds does for Linux; they're just stand in figures that people project their love or in this case hate onto. I doubt he personally wrote a single line of code for Proton. In that case Linus Torvalds is actually way more involved with Linux than Andy Yen is with Proton; Andy Yen might have more power over Proton but afaik and like you said Proton is owned in majority by its foundation, which I hope does get a say in what they do.
How dare you find a tone to respond that makes me regret my original harsh choice of words a little? :P Still - my point was that no matter how much Torvals is involved, the linux ecosystem isn't under his control, while proton services are very much under corporate control, and if their CEO decides to introduce a backdoor for american nazi services, that can happen.
He directly profits from Proton subscriptions. As does the rest of the leadership which seem to back him on this.
A comparison of singing the praises for a modern proto-fascist movement with "secretly loving Windows" is... certainly something.