I keep hearing bad stuff about proton, but I don’t really get most of it. Could someone please explain all of the controversy to me. Lastly, what are the best alternatives to all of their services?
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- cardfire@sh.itjust.worksEnglish1 day
First and foremost any for-profit organization on a long enough trend line tends to inshitify, and proton is a for-profit organization masquerading as a not-for-profit one ( it has an NPO in its Advisory Board).
So I don’t want to rely on any one platform vendor or Cloud host or point of failure for my privacy and my productivity, not after Google, never again. Even if I allow a few components of proton into my text act, I wouldn’t want to be locked into the ecosystem.
Second, it’s leadership has said permissive things about fascists in my country in the past few years. They have donated to political organizations I do not want to align with their values and interests are not necessarily mine.
For those reasons, I use one vendor with European hosting for my password manager, a different one for my email and calendar, (Tutanota) and I am actively evaluating what office and productivity Suite I will use going forward , but currently just use Libra office wherever I need it and cryptpad when I need to quickly share something in a table or document with people over the internet.
VPN and privacy apps come from DuckDuckGo for great about not retaining my info.
Myself host my photos (Immich) and files using free open source software projects , along with my media library through Jellyfin.
Proton’s CEO loves republicans and supports fascist influencers.
- 3 days
Andy Yen
Known for: Proton founder (ProtonMail, Proton VPN, etc)
Proton claims to be politically neutral, but in early 2025 Andy praised the Republican party on X, and Proton issued an “official response” on Mastodon and Reddit (later deleted as “not actually official”) re-enforcing that Proton and/or Andy threw their hat in with Trump and the Republican party.
Current best alternative if you want to stay in the cloud: Tuta
- 1 day
Did Drew DeVault include himself on this list? He’s definitely worse than many of the people listed there.
- Mustachius_Grumpius@thelemmy.clubBanned from community2 days
https://community.bitwarden.com/t/published-version-update-in-app-stores/102750
bitwarden just went commercial guys
I would being using tuta if they didnt delete 3 of my accounts for 6 months of activity lol
Were they free accounts? They are pretty strict with free accounts. They’re not some google that can just provide a free service to everyone and not care about the cost. You can get a paid account that shouldn’t be deleted for extremely cheap like 2-3$ a month I think, and then you get multiple email aliases and stuff too. I get not wanting to pay for email, but if it’s free you’ve just got to accept you are probably the product.
- 3 days
For me it’s their ransomware-like business model of: attracting new users with free accounts, incentivizing them to migrate their Gmail inbox to Proton (Easy Switch), encrypting the content (“for security”), and then letting them find out that a paid feature (Bridge) is necessary to integrate the mailbox into a third-party client like Thunderbird (as a decryption layer in between); well, unless you want to manually export the mailbox using their Mail Export Tool. I’m not opposed to paying for a service (I also donate to Disroot), but I dropped them like a hot brick when I found out: thankfully not the hard way (I tested integration before migration).
- 2 days
Nothing, people just hold on to the CEO bullshit take on US politics, which was said in early 2025, which is almost 2 years ago at this point.
Tldr: emotion-driven incels making a scene for a non-issue, but i can understand why bcuz USA republicans are a cancer to the world like Israel.
people just hold on to the CEO bullshit take on US politics
…echoed and reinforced by Proton’s business account. That’s not a nothingburger. Trust is a privacy company’s greatest asset - and an asset easily destroyed if the company is found to have political leanings that are inherently adverse to privacy and freedom.
2 dayswhich is almost 2 years ago at this point
The last time I thought this was a long duration my mom made my lunches for me
- 2 days
Valid for certain things, but holding on to things of lesser importance doesnt make you an adult, it makes you resentful
- 2 days
Ok, but you realize that 2025 was already post-election, and Trump started doing horrible shit from day 1. So if someone supported him in 2025, odds are their opinion hasn’t changed much. Which makes them garbage.
How about holding on to the insult ‘incel’ for people who don’t want to feed fascists their dollar
- 2 days
Email - Tuta Mail
VPN - IVPN
Drive - Selfhost Nextcloud or Tuta Drive
Calendar - Selfhost Nextcloud or Tuta Calendar
Docs/Sheets - Selfhost Nextcloud or LibreOffice (offline)
Pass - Bitwarden or KeePassXC (offline)
Authenticator - 2FA or Aegis (both are offline but that’s a good thing with 2FA)
Meet - Jitsi
Lumo - Local AI or Kagi Assistant (paid, comes with privacy-focused search engine) or Duck.ai (free)
- brave_lemmywinks@lemmy.worldEnglish1 day
What happened to mullvad? It used to be protonvpn and them as default recommendations, now it’s another two.
- 15 hours
One of two Mullvad CEOs personally donated 5,000,000 SEK (~500K USD) to the Swedish Örebro party, who support ethnic cleansing. “Sweden is for the Swedes”.
Mullvad’s response was just fence-sitting on the issue.
By paying for Mullvad, you are funding the man who donated to the far-right Örebro party, and likely will again.
- 2 days
NymVPN is too new for me to feel comfortable using personally. Also it seems that they worked with Brave which I’m certainly not a fan of.
I wouldn’t recommend Jottacloud as their privacy policy seems iffy and they don’t have e2ee.
Filen’s privacy policy seems better, although they do say they do analytics. They do have e2ee though. Definitely much closer to Tuta than Jottacloud.
Harry Halpin is the CEO of Nym and is at least a CEO who’s politically on the good side. And Chelsea Manning works for Nym.
Yeah, the Brave Ad-block and no WireGuard Configs are not so good, but so far I enjoy NymVPN.
People who use Jottacloud should encrypt their data before sending it over.
- 2 days
I once saw people also recommend airvpn in the same context as ivpn, do they also have some issues or are they just too unknown?
I’ll keep it short, but provide links for further reading. First off, I don’t think proton is “bad”, or anyone is trash-talking them legitimately. Both their jurisdiction (Switzerland), dedication to FOSS and good audit results make them a solid choice.
Diversification is my main reason why I’d never go all-in on Proton. Over the years, they’ve grown an ever more complete suite of apps (e-mail, calendar, VPN, password manager, docs, AI) that does share some similarity with the Google app suite in that you’re essentially putting all eggs in one company’s basket - and a lot of trust with that. If Proton got hacked, got subverted by a three-letter agency, or just got taken advantage of by a rogue employee, the effects would be much more impactful than if it had just been your e-mail provider, just your VPN service, just your…
Also, Proton’s official social media account echoing CEO Andy Yen’s private statements on U.S. politics haven’t helped convince people that the company is, indeed, politically neutral and solely focused on privacy.
This sums it up well. Their products are fine, but putting everything into one company isn’t a good idea, and the political statements leave little faith.
I use their free Drive for sharing files, but I’ve moved to Tuta for email and just about everything else selfhosted. I’m still running out a mullvad subscription but I’ll be switching that to IVPN when it expires.
I’m still running out a mullvad subscription but I’ll be switching that to IVPN when it expires.
I’m in the same boat: still on Mullvad, but eager to switch due to… things. May I ask what your main reason is to consider IVPN above all others? I’m still stuck choosing between IVPN, Proton and Nym.
If the CEO of a privacy company supports political forces that are deeply anti-liberty and anti-privacy, that does constitute a “need” to switch, don’t you think?
No.
You are not donating to a cause when you purchase goods or services. You are not liable for what someone else does with their money.
Boycotts are only effective when paired with direct action. There is no direct action in this case.
Boycotts that involve not using some necessary service are paired with replication of service through the group organizing the boycott. There is no replication of service in this case.
So you aren’t responsible for the actions of the mullvad owner and not using it isn’t an effective method of changing his behavior (there is no direct action or service replication to accompany an organized boycott, which I would also argue there isn’t since people who made the decision to switch didn’t do so in a unified way or with any demands).
But does it protect you to leave mullvad?
No.
You’re leaving the most straightforward, private and secure vpn with if not the best apps, certainly best in class apps, and a history of literally functioning as a brick wall against investigations by the authorities. No other provider has done what mullvad has done when the screws were put to them because no other provider has had that happen.
So it accomplishes nothing and makes you less safe.
It just seemed like the most similar choice that meets my needs. I looked at some of the other options - I’d go with Proton if it weren’t for the issues mentioned, I used them for a bit and the service works very well. Nym seemed interesting, but I don’t believe they offer Wireguard configs? I could be wrong.
It [IVPN] just seemed like the most similar choice
A lot of things are similar indeed, with one essential difference: the raid on Mullvad did prove their no-logs policy was no bullshit. I haven’t found anything similar on IVPN.
Nym seemed interesting, but I don’t believe they offer Wireguard configs?
Good call, they don’t. When is that relevant, though? When you want to connect a headless machine, such as a server?
- 3 days
Wireguard is generally fast and secure. All the other transport options fail on at least one of those (OpenVPN is secure and slow, L2TP is slow and insecure, IPSec and IKEv2 are less secure and brittle).
Essentially, the one downside to Wireguard is prevalence. So if you can find somewhere trustworthy that it IS an option, why not?
That said, I do wonder why more people don’t turn to global Tailscale networks and bypass central control. Of course, you DO need some way to establish trust for your Tailscale network.
If you’re willing to pay though, why not just spin up a VPS somewhere and run Tailscale on it? You control the logging, Your exit node is on a trusted netblock, and you can connect whatever you want to it over Wireguard.
- 2 days
If you’re willing to pay though, why not just spin up a VPS somewhere and run Tailscale on it?
It is some effort to set up, and VPS seems generally more expensive than a commercial VPN which has more nodes and other extra things. You’re moving your location which is cool, but multiple people use VPN nodes which serves as a mask because you can’t differentiate what traffic belongs to which user; You’re also still trusting whoever you rent your VPS from that they haven’t set up some sort of monitoring on a higher level before tailscale running on the machine can encrypt traffic.
Aren’t proton thinking of moving out of Switzerland because the swiss jurisdiction got so bad? https://swissobserver.com/news/proton-threatens-swiss-exit-over-surveillance-law/
- 2 days
Murena (Mail, Cloud, Workspace, Vault, Galery, Office suite, Tasks, Calendar, Notes, Phones (FairPhone), e/OS, e/Os for kids), OpenSource, encrypted, made in the EU (France)
- 2 days
It would be nice if their home page showed anything about anyhting, like about what they do and who they are instead of redirecting to a completely sterile login page.
- 3 days
Yes. There is controversy about the CEO. But mostly for me: is security theater. And in don’t trust them. Email will never work as a secure communication layer. Stop pretending it will. There a reasons which is tied to the protocol level, that make pgp non sufficient. There are also the pgp technology it self (no forward secrecy, no deniability, key management etc). Then there is the obvious fact about an email from proton to gmail, and 99% of other email providers, simply not being secure/encrypted. So you buy a privacy tool, which neglects to tell you: we actually don’t provide privacy at all - unless you treat proton emails as proton chat - strictly proton to proton… at which point youd be better of with e g signal.
If you insist: mailfence.org allows you to upload and control you own pgp keys. That’s interoprational with proton. Simarly priced i think, also Schweiz, and a bit more honest and strict imap (no bridge). But honestly… stop treating email as secure.
- 2 days
Its crypto from the 90s and email is not meant to be secure. Some examples:
Only the mail body is protected, headers and metadata arent, so an attacker still knows with who you are talking about what.
Replies contain the full thread, if one person messes up once, the entire chain is unencrypted.
No ephemeral keys, no cleanly defined rotation mechanism. If someone gets your key, all past messages are also accessible.
It depends on your threat model. The actual crypto portion of it holds up, at least until we have crypto-relevant quantum computers.
If you want anonymization and PFS for basic messaging, yeah PGP + email isn’t going to cut it. But if you’re sending documents, for example, with financial or health data tied to my identity anyway, I’d take PGP with my own email provider over TLS to some tech company servers where it sits unencrypted any day.
so an attacker still knows with who you are talking about what.
>implying i fill out the subject box with anything meaningful 🤪
- 2 days
TY for informing me. Is there a better alternative to PGP even with the other downsides of email you listed?
- 2 days
Signal is probably best, since it has volume to hide in, and it’s difficult/ impossible to screw up. Partly because it’s centralized. Which is the problem with e.g mateix protocol - each node can configure thi gs a bit differently. Also why you should use the official app imo.
This is a decent walk through: https://www.privacyguides.org/en/basics/email-security/
But simple duckduckgoing can provide much more
https://5blockchains.com/posts/pgp-vs-signal/
https://ubos.tech/news/pgp-encryption-security-crisis-why-cryptography-needs-modern-alternatives/ (feels a bit clanker like - but info is legit)
From what I understand, Proton’s CEO has polarizing opinions to put it lightly. There’s other controversies than that, but that seems to be the main point of contention now in days.
As for alternatives, you have 3. Tutanota, Mailbox.org, or using mainstream options and manually using OpenGPG encryption yourself.
That, and its generally ill advised to “put all your eggs in one basket”.
Yeah, you can also host your own mail server or VPS and FDE (full disk encryption) the whole thing, which i have for some stuff, but generally it’s not great because cloud hosting service ip blocks are usually marked very low reputation by general mail providers, so your legitimate emails are very likely to go to spam even if you have spf, dkim, and the like all set up.
Important to note, just like proton mail or competitors though, full disk encryption prevents anyone from getting into your mail, but it does not shield messages you send. For that you need something like openpgp to encrypt actual email content, like you said.
- 3 days
There’s nothing inherently bad about it.
I use their cloud storage (and docs occasionally), a different VPN service, and a different email provider. Don’t put all your eggs in one basket as another user here said.
It is “purple google” as yet another user said, but that’s one thing that makes it great. It’s not harvesting all your personal data like google does, but provides a similar service.
Proton is Israel’s bitch.
Wait, what? They are dealing/ having contracts with Israel companies or its government?
- bedwyr@piefed.caEnglish2 days
There are internet blacklists, several dozen, purportedly for scammers, and Israel is dropping their critics on them, and proton takes it at face value, with no appeal option.
Plus the US gave them lists of accounts to deleted and they did. They are bitches.
