You can have a little bit of both. It doesn’t have to be all one or one of everything. I use Proton for email, VPN, and drive. However, I maintain a secondary email address with Tutanota, use BitWarden for my password manager, and have my 2FA covered with YubiKey. I didn’t want to put all my eggs in one basket with Proton because it presents a single point of failure if my account is compromised. It also makes switching to different services harder (should Proton ever have a change in values).
2 Likes
Thankfully Proton makes it easy to export everything, on every service they provide.
+1 to this. With the CEO promoting Trump, the disingenuous launch of their AI and lately the disingenuous launch of their 2FA app, I would definitely not put everything in Proton.
2 Likes
I can no longer recommend Proton Pass and SimpleLogin. The PG community needs to avoid these two products until Proton changes its policy.
1 Like
My general rule is to keep three major islands
- VPN (anonymization)
- Secret storage (passwords)
I’d only ever consider mixing Email/VPN if i have a local backup and a domain custom domain name that would allow me to migrate email to a new provider.
That’s misinformation he did not “promote Trump” Trump was already voted in as president. The way I read it he was massaging Trump’s ego probably in the hopes that there won’t be bullshit regulation that hits his industry. If anything he was promoting Gail Slater (the pick that Trump made). More so specifically because of her work with antitrust.
Gotta remember these CEOs will say whatever they think is going to get the best result for their company at the time.
5 Likes
Maybe try proton for a few weeks first though before jumping full turkey moving all your data there on day 1. Since proton works on e2e basis, most things thats basic on cleartext service either aren’t available yet, doesn’t work as expected or just buggy. Among proton product, simplelogin, protonvpn and standard notes are the only 3 that i could stomach. Mail, calendar, drive, pass i use other services.
The way I read it he was massaging Trump’s ego probably in the hopes that there won’t be bullshit regulation that hits his industry. If anything he was promoting Gail Slater (the pick that Trump made). More so specifically because of her work with antitrust.
To paraphrase, he didn’t say “I support Gail Slaters” and called it a day, he said Republicans care about the little guy and Democrats care about big business.
Surely you can see the irony of him saying this while advocating for Gail Slater, who left her anti-trust job over a decade ago to work for Internet Association, a lobbyist group for big tech (including Google, Amazon, and Meta). She worked for the government after that and then sidestepped ‘working for the little guy’ to being a lobbyist for Roku, arguably the worst offender in the country when it comes to privacy.
The only thing that she has made the news for so far is when she got rolled over by the administration and her deputies were fired for refusing to push through a questionable merger deal between HPE and Juniper. As someone who lobbied on behalf of big tech/Roku, it’s not surprising that she didn’t take a stand and instead signed her own name to allow the merger to go through.
She has similarly rolled over for the housing industry as well. Here’s a quote from an article 2 days ago:
“By all indications there is very little appetite for antitrust enforcement from the DOJ,” Francis X. Riley, a partner at Saul Ewing LLP., said. “They just aren’t doing anything. They are letting these mergers go through with limited investigations or limited exchange of information, and this sheds light on the fact that the DOJ is not going to be active in antitrust enforcement actions.”
I say this not to call out your perspective but to point out that at face value, the lip service that the Proton CEO paid to her has more to do w/ his company than an intrinsic interest in protecting privacy.
I agree and disagree at the same time. The Proton CEO has made it clear that he will ‘play the game’ to benefit his company. To Americans he tweets about Republicans standing up for the little guy, yet to Europeans he sounds like a ‘woke liberal’ as he talks about transparency, science, freedom, not taking democracies for granted and standing up to America.
His amorality is a benefit so long as it aligns with you as a consumer. With that said, I did not come across the CEO for Tuta or Disroot or Ente or any other privacy company warmly embracing Gail Slater given her lobbyist background for companies that are anti-privacy.
Personally, I jumped ship from Proton after his brazen comments, but I admittedly wasn’t overly invested in the Proton ecosphere to begin with, so the decision wasn’t very hard for me. For others, I would encourage diversification.
3 Likes
Because that’s the narrative they want to hear. It’s obvious lip service for a man who has a ego issues.
Maybe so, but he didn’t pass any comment on Roku.
All of this is after the post by Andy.
Proton primarily sells “encryption services” either in the case of Proton Mail and VPN services. I would speculate this has more to do with pacifying the current administration and avoiding the previous kinds of interest. Surely we remember this? US attorney general William Barr says Americans should accept security risks of encryption backdoors as well as the repealing of section 230.
It’s same “shift” that some other companies did in their messaging when Trump got elected. To some extent these relationships have benefited US tech companies.
1 Like
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.
1 Like
I don’t think it was really about that at all as it’s not like he was involved in the decision making process that led to her being given that position. I think people are reading more into it than what is actually there.
There are quite likely a lot of other things the Trump administration does that he doesn’t agree with, and for the time being I totally expect he would keep those thoughts to himself as any CEO would.
Agreed, that way you limit risk if you were to be locked out of something.
Self-host everything you can. Email can be tricky (need a clean IP and a domain name). Proton is probably OK, but as far as I remember you do not get IMAP access on the free tier. For me, that’s a non-starter.
1 Like