Excellent article, I agree with all points made. The last bit is something I hadn’t considered - if Proton can create a legally viable alternative to Privacy.com that works for non-US users, or an alternative to Google Pay that works on degoogled ROMs, it would be completely without competition.
Nice article. I liked that we tried to keep it an agnostic analysis focusing on the tool features. In particular, it didn’t mention Proton’s podcast interview that came out later.
The other thing that I liked a lot is the left panel. It has so much good information:
@jonah if you don’t mind me asking, in the conclusion you opened a little bit about your opinion on cryptocurrencies: “Personally, I’m a bit of a cryptocurrency pessimist in general, but I can see some appeal for the technology in very specific areas.”
Since, I feel that this is an open community/environment that entice the critical thinking and we can sometimes “intimately” discuss openly our opinions with the forum admins, what do you feel optimist in the financial realm when discussing privacy transaction options?
You added the potential for the inclusion of traditional credit/debit digital wallet support and space for Proton to rise as a third-party alternative to Apple Pay and Google Wallet. Aren’t those still too much tied/exposed to our traditional banking privacy problems? Those are probably questions that involves some philosophical personal believes in the economical system so perhaps I should be building my own conclusions after doing more research but found this an opportunity to interact with an informed curious mind.
Again, nice article, I see that is in the review category under article. The last one was back in 2021 with Firefox. Would be nice to see more of those review format articles keeping the rating system and perhaps moving it up as a separate section from articles so it doesn’t get buried and forgotten.
I did briefly mention the interviews they’ve done, and kept them in mind while writing, but yeah the article wasn’t about the interviews by any means. What they say in their interviews is fairly irrelevant to me anyways, the only things people can really count on are things that already exist.
For reviews of products we actually recommend I’d imagine we’ll link to the review alongside their recommendation listing on the site, so they are easily found. For reviews like this one we probably won’t separate them out further than they already are, but they’ll be searchable on the site. For things like this (Proton Wallet) the idea is more to get the reviews in front of people searching for the product on Google/DDG/whatever than for our regular readers who already know what our crypto recommendations are.
Yes, but decoupling it from the big tech companies like Google still presents an overall improvement on its own. Maybe Proton would be able to improve upon it further. I don’t know the specifics of how to make a more private system, but Proton has a smart team. I’m sure if there’s room for improvement they could figure something out, and if there’s nothing more they can do in the financial space then hey, it probably won’t happen. 
More and more banks are offering virtual card numbers, I see that as a huge improvement when it comes to tracking. It doesn’t prevent the bank from tracking you, but your card number right now is basically a unique fingerprint that merchants can use to track your purchasing across sites.
The unfortunate thing with this is that it seems to be a US-exclusive feature for the most part, so the rest of the world has some catching up to do in this regard.