One wonders why the rest of the Proton Foundation hasn’t stepped in and gotten rid of Andy; I assume it’s just because they don’t actually care about privacy, they’re just cryptonerds.
I suggest you give a read to “Privacy is power” by Carissa Veliz (on the board). She also gave a very good interview on the podcast “firewalls don’t stop dragons”.
I also don’t think “cryptonerds” applies to people like Tim Berners Lee.
The problem is they continue to allow Andy Yen, the CEO of Proton, to remain on the board.
Yes that’s true, and that seems quite natural. His poor communication in a tweet is not a reason to fire someone from a board, in my opinion. Especially since at the best of my knowledge he didn’t do anything that harmed the privacy of anybody, nor he showed inclination to do so.
In any case, if you find yourself “assuming” that people that have years of track record caring about privacy and similar issue “don’t care about privacy” or “are cryptonerds”, maybe you should reflect a second. This is why I said to go listen to her interview or read her pieces.
I’d say this move seems too dumb even for fiction, if that wasn’t the SOP for the entire country I live in.
Given the context though, I’m curious if one of you privacy experts can change my mind on how I approach email.
I don’t use email for any meaningful communication where I expect privacy. It is essentially the way for companies and a few other organizations to send me low priority information and/or confirm my identity to reset a password or whatever. Because of that, the only attributes of an email service I really care about are reliability and availability, including not having emails silently blocked for not coming from a “trusted” provider.
So what is the practical risk of just using a Gmail address for that stuff, equivalent to hiding in plain sight? Yeah it helps Google fine tune their advertising model for me, while I’m running Linux on all my machines and blocking ads on any device I touch. My social media is Lemmy and my streaming service is Jellyfin.
Am I risking too much if I use it as the corporate contact point that it is? Am I just letting my white/straight/cis/male privilege show through?
I mean yeah I think the main problem is just Google having all that data about you and potentially selling it to others whether that be for advertising, robocalling, or other things. So it really just comes down to how comfortable you are allowing Google to be able to use your emails and communications from corporations to see what things you like. Only time it really matters more is if you are using email for more personal or secure communications which yeah I would always prefer using better encrypted more messaging focused apps like signal for or just talking in person when possible.
I don’t use email for any meaningful communication where I expect privacy. It is essentially the way for companies and a few other organizations to send me low priority information and/or confirm my identity to reset a password or whatever.
As a privacy enthusiast (expert seems too much), this immediately stood out. Privacy is the context of emails means that all my data which includes the content of the messages but also the metadata (who I talk to, which services I use - like in your example -, when I communicate, how often, etc.) is kept private, meaning not used for anything else than providing me the service (i.e., let me send and receive emails). From this point of view, even if you consider the content of your emails not sensitive, already the fact that you do use company X (because they sent you a password reset email) is data about you, and as such can and will be mined by Google to profile you or to sell it.
Am I risking too much if I use it as the corporate contact point that it is? Am I just letting my white/straight/cis/male privilege show through?
Nobody can tell you this, because risk in this context is purely a subjective estimation, and you are free to do what you please. However, I do care about my privacy, which means that I want to minimize the amount of data about me available for sale or to others in general. For me the motivation is quite simple, while I do block ads everywhere too and I generally don’t have an impact in terms of getting personalized ads, once the data is collected I have no idea what will be used for, by whom and for what purpose. It doesn’t even matter if the data actually allows to infer accurate things about me, it’s enough that someone (e.g., insurance company, employer, bank, government, etc.) is gullible enough to believe that inference is correct. In the book “Privacy is power” (written by Carissa Veliz) she also develops a very interesting argument about the fact that violating your privacy usually means also violating the privacy of the people near you (the people with whom you share demographic, the people you communicate with etc.). This could be another point of view to consider.
Anyway, if for you the above is fine, there is no other significant risk you are taking, and you should keep using Gmail if that suits you.
A technical note. Secure email providers generally can have technical controls (i.e., encryption) to protect the body (content) of the email, and in some cases some small amount of metadata (e.g., Tuta encrypts also the subject). Generally though, you are still trusting the provider to perform that encryption (especially because a mail from Gmail -> Proton/Tuta would be encrypted by Proton/Tuta) and to not use metadata for any purpose besides delivering the emails. So privacy here doesn’t mean absolutely removing the data from a third party, but it means giving it to a third party who uses it (due to contractual obligation, business incentives etc.) only for the intended purpose in a privacy-preserving way.
This really sucks, I like using Proton and now I want to leave… WTF
I feel like those resources are about to get even more limited.
Sad, but I’m largely indifferent to this.
Any alternative free VPN’s
If you aren’t the customer, you are for sure the product. Even then, sometimes you are both.
Nothing good is free.
I’ve been pretty happy with PIA.
Pointing people to reddit, as if that’s an alternative. When a VPN provider makes such bad choices it’s tempting to imagine that the decision was influenced by somebody who wants to secretly get the message out that the company is no longer to be trusted, because it’s hard to see any other logic in it.
We have to wait and see what the next audit is going to find, that will give us more security than any kind of information provided from Proton themselves.
The Swiss laws are also helping to make it so they keep the privacy standards high.
But I would definitely use your own domain for your Proton mail currently
Reddit has a ton of users. Mastodon is marginal.
Privacy usually doesn’t mean following what’s popular.
Protón is just a bunch of criptonazis
proton fans are bootlickers
Three years ago I made an issue on their feedback page because the android app doesn’t really work on degoogled phones, it requires gms for notifications. Still not fixed.
Nice privacy focused App that can’t fully be used if you take privacy seriously.
FYI i use a degoogled FP3 with microG and I don’t have any problem.
Lmao k bye Proton
I’m searching for a safe and cheap alternative for my own domain, but it’s hard! And I don’t want to give money to American companies.
I been using Canadian webhost hosterbox.com for several years. Been very happy with them.
Mailbox.org located in Germany and run by Peer Heinlein. You can use your own Domain with it just fine
tuta.com is great for me so far
Tuta Mail is free for personal use, though you must accept a few limitations. The free edition lets you send and receive all the secure messages you want, and it includes a secure calendar. Searching encrypted email is limited—with the free edition, you can only search messages up to a month old. Paying 36 euros per year for a Revolutionary subscription ($38.65 as of this writing) removes that search limitation, lets you have multiple calendars, and adds features including filtering rules and 15 alias email addresses (more about those later). It also raises the storage for your messages from 1GB to 20GB.
yea I just went with a paid plan right off the bat since I have a custom domain, has been totally fine
Namecrane, I think they are Canadian
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Tuta takes like 48 hours to respons, slower than Proton who takes about 12-24 hours, but as long as the response is under 1 week, its fine by me.
Are you talking about support request response time here? Or what response time?
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While I understand the concern around not wanting to support Maga or far right leaning extremists. I take somewhat of a net neutral approach to this topic. Just because some company isn’t doing something I like doesn’t mean they haven’t produced a good product. For instance people whine and bitch all the time about Apple using child labor but that doesn’t stop most people from owning a. IPhone because we like iphones. Amazon is a crazy huge company that has time and time again treated thier employees like trash and yet we still use amazon prime. What are we going to do if Farmers and slaughter houses all vote for Trump? Stop buying groceries? No. Most people only care when it’s convenient to care. We don’t really want change or progress because to be honest most of us aren’t going to or want to take up arms and start another civil war all over again. The arguments and fighting we have in the states is nothing new. We’ll stay silent and continue are word vomit on social platforms while the world eats us alive because really trying would be too hard. That’s the truth.
Well this is certainly only one of the decisions of all time. I guess we finally got our reaction from the board. I was waiting, hoping to hear some rebuke of Yen’s bullshit. Didn’t expect another intentional step into shit. Bye Felicia.
That doesn’t take lot ressource for communication on both social network.
I’ll take a guess that they are going back to Reddit so they can control what gets posted and shown to others. They got railed on Mastodon following the drama, which is probably why they’re leaving.
It depends how they are doing it.
People learned years ago that there is a big difference between microblogs (twitter), blogs (facebook and tumblr), and message boards (reddit). And there are major differences even within those. The post you make for tumblr and the post you make for facebook are targeting very different audiences. Which IS time consuming for a good community manager and is shitty 100 character blog posts for someone’s nephew.
From checking out their bluesky, it looks like proton is pulling out of all the microblogs in favor of just reddit (https://bsky.app/profile/proton.me). Which sucks but is “fine”. And it is likely more that positive engagement on Mastodon was just too low to even be worth multi-posting once every two weeks. Which… is something a lot of not shitty companies have decided to be the case.
That said: I didn’t check twitter because fuck that shit. If they are still super active there then, yeah, ridiculously “sus”.
Thank i didn’t see from this perspective. On mastodon the character limit is very small so i didn’t understand how difficult it could be as i would do the same communication everywhere to stay consistent.
In my opinion, they wanted to avoid the backfire from their ceo supporting Trump.
You’re welcome to believe whatever makes you happy in this post truth hellscape we live in.
But reddit (generally left on drugs, center-right on social issues) tears into them pretty regularly for that. Bluesky seems to be left-center-left-ish and is also a place where people can tear into the account. And while there are much better moderation tools on both platforms, that still doesn’t protect them for the equivalent of a trending hashtag or /all post.
We can only speculate but considering plenty of people have criticized the mastodon community over the past year or so (Alec from Technology Connections being a great example where, if anything, he should be our patron saint rather than the guy who gets harassed any time his posts get surfaced by The Algorithm) AND basically the entire “internet” decided on bluesky… it likely really is just cost cutting and not caring enough to monitor the mastodon account.
Also, it looks like they have a Threads account anyway? https://www.threads.net/@protonprivacy. Which means that the Mastodon users can still follow them? I forgot what the status on federation with facebook ended up being.
It’s kinda weird though. Mastodon can have a pretty high character limit, on par with a reddit comment length.
The instance my author account is on has it set to a much higher limit. Enough so that I can post a short story in two, maybe three sections.
If it’s the lowest possible character limit that’s the problem, they could definitely get around that with damn near zero effort.
Which is whatever, I get that streamlining social media reduces time costs, I’m more questioning the one they chose in terms of how much upkeep it’ll be compared to other options. Reddit is going to have a lot more bullshit to wade through.
Lol
