How do you use aliases with Substack? Do you use multiple aliases or just one?

[PurpleDime]

@xe3

Personally, I’d reach out to Proton support and explain the situation, politely explain your frustration with the policy and why it doesn’t make sense in the case of substack (and in many other cases).

I did reach out to Proton to express my frustration. I think it was last year. I had not encountered the specific dilemma of Substack back then, but I told them about the issues this rule presents. They don’t seem like they are going to budge.

@xe3

If you want to see Proton change this misguided policy, Proton needs to hear about (and spend a few minutes of support time reading and responding to) all of the plethora of legitimate situations where it is useful or necessary to use more than one alias with a single service. The more they hear about legit use-cases, the more they hear about customer frustrations, the more likely they are to rethink the misguided policy.

1000% agree. This is why it is so important that users voice these issues to Proton via customer support. I intend to do it again, but that is not enough.

We must raise public awareness

We need to raise awareness publicly on forums like PG and on other social media platforms. Because if we only raise it in private, it becomes easy for Proton to ignore.

It’s very common for companies not to react to complaints until some influencers with lots of subscribers make noise. It shouldn’t have to be that way.

Most users are unaware

Another reason to do it is because most Proton users are not aware of this rule. Partly because it is hidden in the ToS, but also because it is not explicit. The ToS doesn’t say that you are only allowed one alias per third party website. It says that they don’t allow “abuse” and “bulk sign-ups” which they get to interpret however they want.

To me, “bulk” means a lot. Two is not bulk. If I buy five apples, I didn’t buy them in bulk. But to Proton, any number more than 1 = bulk. To Proton, abuse means creating more than one alias per third party website. But you will only find that out if you talk to customer support, or when they decide to enforce this rule, not by reading the ToS.

Some people recently found out.

Others as as far back as 3 years ago.

The person above got their entire Proton account suspended.

I told Proton that even if they never change this rule, which would suck, at the very least they can make it explicitly clear in their ToS. You know what they replied? That their ToS was already clear.

I’m working on a PG post

So, yeah, I plan to make a public post specifically on this issue where I will not only explain why this rule is impractical but also how it presents real security and privacy risks. I failed to make my case to Proton privately, but I hope I can make my case to the privacy community so we make more noise collectively.

@xe3

Practically speaking, beyond trying to get them to change the policy, or ignoring the rule and hoping it isn’t enforced, I think the only solution would be to use any other aliasing service (at least for substack)

Yes, I mostly agree. However, I want to be 100% sure that I correctly understand how Substack works before I do that. Because, if I am correct, anyone could rack up many aliases just for Substack, and I could see how that could potentially be a problem for other alias providers too.

Right now, there are less than 10 substacks I’m interested in. That’s not a lot. But 10 aliases for the same website is a pretty high number. At least I know that Addy is fine with having 3 aliases for the same website because I’ve asked them specifically. Proton is too strict, and that needs to change.