They’ve always taken the concept of privacy to such an extreme. What is happening there that they’ve started pushing so hard in the opposite direction?
this post was submitted on 22 May 2025
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Well, there goes ProtonMail. Let's hope it is not enacted. I'll wait for other neutral reports since Tuta is a major competitor. Should be a quick search.
Proton themselves pointed this out already but I think people didn't trust them because they interpreted it that Proton wants to move servers to countries with lower privacy standards, which is not true.
Proton has made some statements about exiting Switzerland if these proposals become law. But who knows how long that would take and if any damage is done in the meantime.
Plus there’s other junk going on lately with Proton as a company…
What kinda junk?
Basically one of the founders, Andy, posted on twitter some praise of Donald Trump and the US Republicans party. I didn’t love but it wasn’t so exactly horrible IMO. But as people replied, Andy started answering via Proton’s official twitter account. And these were much worse.
Unfortunately, the original posts are now deleted. Even the discussions that I participated in here on Lemmy are now deleted. So it’s definitely hard to share much info. Here’s a copy/pasta of something from my inbox:
The worst part was not Andy's initial posts it was his initial "let me correct the narrative" follow ups where he went on to bash Democrats and call the Republicans the party of the little guy, which is in many ways untruthful.
It's just a really bad look overall. This is basically how it started with us finding out Musk was such a mess too.
Here’s Proton’s official response on Reddit, from 6 months ago. If you care to dig up more info, this should be a good starting point. Maybe the original posts are available on archive.org?
For my purposes, the event prompted me to learn a tad more about Proton’s finances. I discovered that the company donates to political parties in the US and elsewhere. IMO, this kind of thing gives people a good reason to care about this kind of “internet drama” because Proton uses its revenue to influence politics. I don’t know any details of how they do so, but this event made me question if I should continue using their services.
Ah ok yes, I was aware of a lot of that, I though there was something new that happened
Swiss law takes years — a change this big will probably go to referendum which adds a couple extra years as well. Expect this in the news for a while before anything happens.
Tuta is hardly a competitor. They don't even do PGP encrypted email.
It is almost like we should not rely on a single country
Decentralisation 🤝