Didn’t even know about this. That’s very promising.
As someone who (happily) left Proton directly after the CEO debacle, I was onboard with your points until at the end you dove head first into the same GOS fear tactics & bashing tribalism that instantly drove me away years ago from that project.
Whilst I will never use Proton myself, for f&f that ask, its certainly an option they should consider, in particular from where they are coming from.
Is it required I burn down other privacy projects in order to justify my own use case, based upon my own requirements or personal values?
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You’re not adding anything except asking for evidence that I obviously don’t have; everyone’s been making assumptions from the start. Go and have a look on Reddit and even on the GrapheneOS forum to see how many people (a minority, perhaps, or perhaps not) are starting to be wary of Proton
The fact that Tuta is promoting a product that’s less secure than GrapheneOS, for example, doesn’t shock me; Proton is already doing the same, I believe. I don’t agree with what they say on their blog, but never mind.
It’s time for me to give up on Proton; I hate what they’ve become.
I have had myself a lot of grief against Proton, especially since I am a Linux user. And I have voiced them in several forums.
That said, merely looking at the number of bashers without looking at the quality of their arguments may be misleading, as there are documented troll farms having seemingly unlimited resource to destroy the Proton branding by all means.
Technically, Proton compared to competitors is a little bit like Democracy compared to other regimes, according to Churchill : the worst option, except for all the other ones that have existed until now.
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Thank you for providing valuable context.
The way I see it, European sovereignty seems to be more about protecting Europeans’ data from outsiders, i.e., the US, China, etc… However, I don’t believe this sovereignty fully protects that data from European advertising companies and data brokers, of which there are many.
Also, as far as I know, there are no laws that prevent a European company from being sold to a non-European company. Many tech companies, regardless of where they are based, aspire to be bought by big firms like Google, Apple, or Meta. And even when they don’t, Big Techs can still make them an offer that is too tempting to refuse.
Eons ago, Opera advertised itself as a privacy-friendly browser. I partially bought into it at the time. Opera, the company, is based in Norway, which is not part of the EU but is still in Europe. However, they eventually sold their Opera browser to China, which is not great for privacy.
And as much as I appreciate Proton converting itself into a foundation to entrench their privacy values, many of the worst companies in the world are created as foundations to hide their dark purposes from the public. OpenAI is one of them.
This is very true, but here’s my concern. We often celebrate too soon when Big Tech companies get fined hundreds of millions and sometimes billions of dollars by EU data protection authorities. However, as I understand it, it remains to be seen if Big Tech actually pays those fines, because getting the fine is not the end of the fight for them. They will always challenge them. And with their vast resources, they may win those challenges or get a significantly reduced fine.
According to the EU privacy organization NYOB, many companies, if not most, ignore EU privacy laws. Which is why having strong laws is not enough if they are not consistently enforced. The EU’s privacy laws are better than most regions of the world, but they are not strong enough, nor are they consistently enforced.
One thing I appreciate about the GDPR is that it allows non-profits to file privacy breach complaints on behalf of people, which is why NYOB has been extremely valuable and quite successful at defending privacy rights, and getting Big Tech companies fined.
IMHO, the privacy laws of all countries, should allow non-profits similar to NYOB, to file claims on behalf of citizens, because the average citizen cannot afford to file a legal complaint, especially against big corporations.
I can appreciate that.
It’s better. Still stupid like all LLMs but better.l than it was. I look here and there due to Visionary but if you don’t know the subject, be prepared to be lied too.
As far as this topic goes, if it is true Proton has separate teams working on products then it doesn’t really matter.
Most of the complaints I see are that Proton hasn’t fixed a specific issue for them so any other work is a bad thing. Not that the issues raised with another product aren’t valid but I’m just not sure people understand how different product teams work?
Couldn’t one argue that the salaries of the (say) 15 software engineers who will devote their time to building a new browser could instead go toward hiring the people who would actually close those gaps? A couple of macOS desktop engineers who know Apple’s File Provider API well enough to make Drive sync behave like Dropbox, a cross-platform app engineer or two so Lumo finally gets a native client, a product designer and a UX researcher shared across Lumo and Calendar, a backend engineer with real billing experience, a QA engineer…
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You could but that isn’t how it works. I’d rather a lot of organizations follow my preferred roadmap as well.
The other aspect we may miss is that they may have direction or insights on what to focus on that we lack. They also probably know their user base OSes, etc.
Proton has access to insights, statistics, and strategic planning that we do not. They know what they are doing.
Many of the things that I and other people want are already on the roadmap. They are simply lower in priority than more important features.
For Windows users, Windows clients are the most important. The same applies to macOS, iOS, Android, and Linux users. All of these users have different needs and preferences.
Proton is therefore doing the only reasonable thing a company can do. It focuses on what the majority of users want and need. The reality is that people who want Linux clients, as well as people like me who want notifications that do not depend on FCM, are in the minority. While these features are planned, they are lower on the priority list.
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I wasn’t sure about this at first, but I decided it’s astute of them. People on this forum often forget how out of touch they are to the typical user.
The vast majority of people use default browsers on default settings. That means chrome or edge in most cases. They also use the default password manager, which means chrome and edge are handling their passwords badly. The typical user will not install a single extension and is unlikely to change a single setting.
A proton browser can provide integration with proton services by default: proton pass, proton email aliases, and so forth. Later, it can copy brave’s open source privacy and security upgrades and add their own.
The “How will they monetize it?” question is also not a question. Proton doesn’t need ads or crypto currency - they just need a subset of their users to like the experience enough to want proton unlimited. Though we’ll have to wait to see if it works out this way.
I won’t say it will be good for sure, but it’s a solid strategy to grow proton services. I see this as a way to get people using no good services at all into proton, plus an option for people who already all in on proton ecosystem anyway.
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The text does equally protect European residents from any data processing company. I don’t know about the application, which is more of a political topic, as you mention below. As a European resident, I have the impression that the protection is real against the European ad companies too. For example, many European web sites that used to be freely accessible now have an initial page where you must explicitly choose between accepting data collection or paying before accessing any content. Plus, non-targeted ads have come back big time.
Actually, that doesn’t matter as the GDPR is centered on people (“data subjects”). Companies, anywhere in the world, have to abide by the GDPR as soon as they process European residents’ data. That extended extra-territorial competence has been the object of much tension between USA and EU. And that is why any company in the world that processes European residents’ data is legally obliged to establish a branch (as small as they want) in the EU, so that EU authorities can sue that branch if needed (while the fine is a percentage of the global income).
But as you mention later, attacking a foreign big company is not easy, having them convicted is not easy, and having the fine paid must be a real challenge.
I don’t think Proton is one or them. They do a lot to politically advance privacy-first Internet, Law and standards. They give grants. They could just not do it. If they have evil plans behind that, they really are the champions of evil, way beyond Meta, Alpha and Palantir. And I don’t think those CERN scientists have what it takes to be the champions of evil (maybe because I used to be a physicist myself ^^°).
That’s also something I am wondering.
Unfortunately, you can also add most of the public and governmental organisations. But it’s changing, slowly, as alternative workflows and tools make their way to the decision makers. For example, Nextcloud and lasuite.coop tools are increasingly adopted in European administrations.
The law was too revolutionary to be immediately strictly enforced. But things are progressing.
About suing big corps and NYOB, it all started with a single man sueing Facebook (not the average guy, but still). And he made the Court of Justice of the European Union state, against the almighty (and unelected) European Commission, that Privacy Shield and Safe Harbour had no legal value and that US law was fundamentally incompatible with the European Chart on Human Rights.
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Agreed. While I’m not trying to be negative, and I generally am fine with Proton business practices, this one makes me feel 
It is a smart move for them, instead of spending 2 million Swiss francs in marketing banners every year they will spend 2 million Swiss francs developing a free browser that will remind users about Proton products, Mullvad does the same with its browser. The problem will be attracting users, but may be it works out. I imagine it will be free just like the Mullvad browser.