The conversation in a nutshell
Andy Yen: Gail Slater is a great pick and Republicans are the only one standing up for the little guy
Public Outcry: Hmmm… Full-throated support of the incoming administration/Gail Slater seems odd since they haven’t signaled that they care about privacy or anti-trust outside of breaking apart ‘woke’ companies? This isn’t going to end well.
Gail Slater: Less than 6 months into the job and Slater has had her deputies fired for not pushing through a bad merger, and she has become a toothless yes-(wo)man for the administration
Paraphrasing your response: How could Andy Yen have possibly known we would end up here when he supported Gail Slater, who left her anti-trust work to be a lobbyist for big tech?
Not you specifically, but generally there is a Libertarian streak among many privacy forums that has a large blind spot. Most of us can objectively see in Europe how ‘protect children on the internet’ is a pretext to erode privacy, or in retrospect how government used 9/11 to erode our privacy, yet every current Republican anti-privacy directive goes unchallenged.
There’s obvious examples like aggregating governmental data for ‘efficiency’ that just so happens to create more expansive data profiles on every American, to pushing through laws that allow ISPs to sell user data for profit, or creating a pipeline for your personal health data to be shared with big-tech by default, or things like requiring IDs in the US to ‘protect the children’, or things like giving private Governmental data to Palantir to compile a police state, yet there is little/no interest on the majority of the board to reflect critically on whether the administration is pro-privacy or anti-privacy, and subsequently, what it means when a pro-privacy CEO is seen giving the effusive praise.
Bringing things back on topic, I would encourage that users diversify their privacy services to hedge risk I care about privacy more than Proton’s profitability, I don’t think I can say the same for Andy Yen given his statements.