Separate accounts for different Proton services—Is it good for privacy?

Questions
1

Recently, I made a post to ask whether I should purchase the Proton Unlimited Plan without knowing that there were already multiple posts on this topic. After reading all the comments in the related posts, I understood that decentralization is always better for privacy, so using multiple Proton services from the same account is not very privacy-friendly.

This time I’m asking: if I maintain separate accounts for using different Proton services, will it be a good choice for privacy, or should I use services from other providers instead?

Some of you might wonder why I’m not able to leave Proton for multiple services; believe me, I tried to do that, but I keep coming back to Proton again and again.

ProtonMail is my first and most important service among Proton’s offerings; I can’t quit it.

Besides that, ProtonVPN and Proton Drive are the services I’m planning to use.

Mullvad VPN and IVPN don’t provide regional IPs for my country, so I can’t access regional content and websites with these two VPN services. Whereas Proton VPN offers virtual IPs for my country, and during my testing of Proton VPN on my desktop, I connected to Proton VPN two times together: once from the desktop app and then from the browser extension above it. Still, there was no buffering during 4K playback on YouTube. That’s why, I’m impressed with Proton VPN.

Proton Drive is kind of optional here. I don’t prefer Filen and Tresorit at this moment, and I don’t know of any other cloud storage service that offers client-side encryption for their entire storage and also have a mobile app for Android. So, Proton Drive looks like the last option here. Let me know if there are any alternative that match with my requirements.

What I’m planning is to create three separate Proton accounts and using one of them for each of these services. I also heard that Proton doesn’t allow purchasing plans for multiple Proton services from one single account, so multiple accounts might make sense. Additionally, I’ll definitely purchase paid plans with all of these accounts, so Proton might not ban my accounts by the reason of having multiple free accounts.

I strongly support decentralization, but due to the limitation of services and my personal preference, I’m thinking of following this route. I just want to know if it is good for privacy or not.

2

I think so, to me the proton unlimited plan isn’t an option until they enable separate login criteria for each app. I currently use the free “package” but none as primary apps except for VPN (paid) which has its own account.

Filen has an android app and so does mega.io.

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3

While keeping all your eggs in the same basket is not ideal, spreading your data across various services/accounts also widens your attack surface. As with threat modeling, the sweet spot doesn’t really follow a rule, and instead can vary per person.

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4

What I’m planning is to create three separate Proton accounts and using one of them for each of these services.

I would check ToS if you can do that first. You don’t want to end up in a situation where all of your accounts get disabled due to this.

If proton is your go-to, then tbh I think the risk is less, and you can save money, by just buying a black friday deal from them for a year or 2. I think when I did 2 years ended up at ~198 USD. To clarify consider this in the case that it is against ToS. As you might end up spending extra money and have your accounts on the potential line due to this - especially if the payment mechanism is the same across the board.

Hope that helps!

5

I don’t think they will ever bring this feature; it would increase privacy at the cost of convenience. Most Proton Unlimited users are not very privacy-conscious; they just want a service that is less evil than data-harvesting companies. So, Proton will never want to offend them.

Yeah, but Filen is relatively new; they need to operate for at least the next 2-3 years so that I can trust them. As for Mega, it has a very shady history, and I heard it also shows ads in its Android app, which is not good for privacy, in my opinion.

6

Mega shows ads only with the free plan

7

I’ve already created multiple free Proton accounts while testing their services, though I deleted them after testing.

As for Proton Unlimited, I won’t be using all the paid services that come with this plan, so that will cost me extra at the end of the day. I’m actively using AnonAddy, and a paid SimpleLogin will not be used. I don’t think I need a paid plan for my ProtonMail account either. So, in the end, I’ll be paying around 198 USD just for two main services—VPN and Drive.

Additionally, Proton doesn’t offer plan customization; users can’t buy paid plans for two services from one Proton account. So, in the end, users have to use a separate account for that. I don’t think Proton will ban my accounts for this. And regarding the payment mechanism, I’ll use different payment details, so I’m not worried about that.

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8

I personally believe that spreading out my eggs reduces the chances of having all of them found at once. While it increases my attack surface, if one of my accounts gets compromised, my other accounts will still be safe.

Additionally, I’m more concerned about provider downtime rather than a wider attack surface. Attacks can be mitigated by using strong passwords and strong two-factor authentication, but if the provider goes down for even a minute, I might lose access to all my data during that time.

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9

Actually, the app is the same. If a user holds a free account, advertisements are shown in the app, whereas if a user holds a paid account, ads are not shown in the same app. This means advertisements are built into the app; they just hide them to their paid users.

As a privacy-conscious user, I don’t think this is the right move from a privacy standpoint. Many popular privacy-focused cloud services offer free storage but never show ads on those accounts.

10

Keeping your eggs in the same basket. Or different baskets. The real question is, do you want one giant pile for the fox to go after, or a lot of blind spots for the fox to exploit?

This topic gets debated to death and so many people try to give you a solution for something, when they should be asking a completely different question altogether.

A single basket is just a single point of failure, and scattered baskets are just a thousand points of distraction.

The only thing that actually matters is your recovery plan, no matter how many eggs or how many baskets you have.

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11

This is the answer.