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this post was submitted on 18 Jan 2025
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Privacy
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https://www.reddit.com/r/ProtonMail/comments/1i2ff6q/call_for_andy_yen_to_resign/
UPDATE: Andy Reply
According to Andy's logic, if Hitler were the president of some unfortunate country, we should differentiate the boss from his good nominees. Even using a company founded by an entire community to show a good evaluation made by one of its founders to give him a loving pat on the back and show the world that he is not completely bad as they think, but not meaning that the founder agrees with all his innocent actions, of course, such as disregarding the rights of many people around the world because they are just part of the democratic game.
βPeople forget I donβt live in China. Just because I praise Mao for wanting to shed the yoke of cultural tradition, doesnβt mean I necessary support everything heβs doingβ¦β -Andy, if this was 1966
Careful saying that around these tankie parts.
le false equivalence totally validates my endorsement for the worst president elected in US history
Wow, the comments on that Reddit post. Ok.
So, to get this straight, for you it's impossible to recognize that a pick for a position is a good pick in the Trump government, by definition, without consideration of the actual pick?
To me this is religion, not politics or ideology (which I both consider very good things). To be even more clear, I consider Andy's position completely rational and legitimate in this case. I believe it's absolutely legitimate to be happy Trump picked someone good for a position and at the same time not support the rest 98%. At most, the interesting debate is why that pick is not good, which is 100% opinable and worthy of a discussion.
But saying that any statement, in any context, whatever narrow and specific equal full support is completely insane to me.
If all he said was literally "i approve of this pick for this position" you'd be correct.
What actually happened was he approved of the pick and also claimed the republicans are now actually the party that stands for the "little guy".
Then followed up with a non apology that claimed what he said was not intended to be a "political statement".
by all means, argue that you think there's a fuss over nothing, but if you leave important context out seemingly because it doesn't suit your narrative it weakens your argument substantially.
I know what happened, I followed quite thoroughly.
He thinks that republicans are now the ones with a higher chance to push antitrust cases against big tech (I.e., work for the little guy - EDIT: source). He thinks this based on the last few years and a few things that happened. He likes the nomination from Trump. How is this a full support to Trump? How believing that republicans will do better - in this area - equals being a Nazi?
Of course I believe that there is a fuss over nothing. The above statement has been inflated and I have already read "he applauded to Trump antitrans policies", " posted Nazi symbols" and other complete fantasies.
Many people, who are on the internet on a perpetual witch hunt decided to interpret a clearly specific tweet (about antitrust and big tech) as a global political statement, and read that "little guy" as "common man" or - I have read it here on Lemmy - "working class". Basically everyone tried to propose ideas about why that post was so awful, rather than first trying to understand what the hell he meant. I will agree the first tweet is ambiguous, but that's because it's a 200 characters tweet, he then explained his position quite clearly, and the summary above is what he actually meant.
This "context" added doesn't move my post a centimeter IMO.
While it's certainly true that some of the people who are angry at him for that tweet are saying things in their anger that are overboard, I think only pointing out the most ridiculous things that people who disagree with you have ever said in their anger is a really terrible way of engaging honestly on the subject.
It's important to remember that an authoritarian that always figured out what the right thing to do was and did the opposite of that would be a really bad authoritarian. Republicans at the state level have been increasing state surveillance to hunt down and punish people for choices they make with their own bodies. For a lot of people in America, Trump is the head of the organization that they want privacy to protect themselves from, and the current largest threat to privacy in America.
For the CEO of a company that is supposedly about protecting our privacy to completely unprompted start publicly praising decisions made by the very threat we're supposed to trust them to protect us from, and then to double down on their praise when called out, is deeply concerning.
Yes. It's true that not every single thing Trump does will be the worst possible thing, but his goals are fundamentally opposed to ours. When I say I want big tech to be broken up it's because I want their to be less concentration of power. When Trump wants to break up big tech it's because he wants to eliminate the competition to his concentration of power. That is not worthy of my praise, even if in any one particular instance the thing he is doing is similar to what I would do, and the fact that the CEO of Proton either doesn't understand this or doesn't care is deeply concerning. I do not trust them after this, and I doubt they can ever get that trust back.
He praised one thing, and motivated that praise. It's 100% possible to disagree, but I don't find it concerning at all. I find it reasonable, because proton can better protect the privacy of users if more people can choose freely privacy oriented tools (like proton). Hence, if Trump does or says something that can help moving in that direction, it can be labeled as a good thing. Not every sentence is a collective or global assessment of all things considered.
So I am good with him doing the right thing for the wrong reason, and I wish him a swift failure afterwards.
Have you considered that he might not agree with what is just your opinion? Obviously you are free to draw any conclusion you want and not use them.
See, now that's a more thorough explanation of your position.
I disagree with pretty much all of your assertions (though the witch hunt stuff can be true sometimes) , but at least i know I'm disagreeing with an opinion formed using the whole of the information provided.
It shows you read the initial information in it's entirety and still came to the conclusion you did.
That removes the possibility of responses such as "Did you even read the initial tweet?".
Well... it should remove that possibility, in practice it just means you can safely ignore those responses because clearly the people making those responses haven't read your response in it's entirety.
Context matters. Why did you ignore it? We see so many CEOs kissing Trump's feet these days. Here Andy is, doing the same... Of course I don't know what's in Andy's head, but Trump loves groveling, and clearly Andy is riding that bandwagon on purpose.
That's not context, that's a superficial observation. Zuck kissed the ring by changing Facebook policy to align with trump/musk posture on "free speech", Andy said he likes the antitrust pick. They are completely different things.
Right, Andy's action was bad but not as bad. We agree. It's not identical.
And when given the chance to explain how he felt about this situation, on how the bad timing is ... purely accidental or something ... he did a bad job of it. Which suggests our original conclusions were in fact correct.
Also, if you think observations about time, place, and manner are superfluous, that's a peculiar thought. Maybe we disagree. Maybe I think basic elements of societal interaction and communication are important and informative.
This tweet happened right after trump picked for the antitrust position. The "time" is completely logical, the "place" is a tweet and the manner is a short statement supporting that pick. Also proton is a US company, so it doesn't have the same reason to "bend the knee" as other US big tech are doing.
So it's not that I am ignoring context, I genuinely don't see relation. He praised something that he pushes for years, he did not suddenly switch to "free speech" like Zuck.
Honestly I find his attitude to be quite commendable and I think that speaks much louder than whatever it is you disagree with.
Maybe he should have just left Trump's name out of it entirely as that seems to be what really pushed people's buttons.
People are going to twist things around no matter what is said though. Don't forget hindsight makes everyone look guilty.
It would be one thing if Trump was actually anti-trust...but he isn't.
He's anti companies which don't prostrate themselves in front of him and bow to his whims. They're bad, terrible, anti American companies. The ones that do are great, wonderful, beautiful companies. The bad ones need to be broken up and given to the big ones.
He's so transparent it's painful. If someone says good things about Trump or give him money, they're good. If they don't, they're bad. It's absurdly obvious.
If that motivation still leads to work against tech monopolies, good. Can't wait for people to do the right thing for the right reason. If that won't happen it will be criticized as a lack of action.
Ultimately the benefit for the population is having as much freedom and fair competition in the tech space as possible. If that comes from Trump hallucinations, from a dream or from something else, who cares...?
How can anyone possibly think that Trump is against tech monopolies when Bezos, Musk, and Zuckerberg are going to be sitting behind him shoulder to shoulder at the inauguration?
It doesn't, never did, never will.
I can't believe we have to argue in 2025 about this.
The whole project 2025 is about breaking bad regulations, antitrust won't survive. You just have to kiss the ring, and do whatever.
He should have just stayed the fuck out of Americans politics being a provider of a secure service that many Americans of all political persuasions use.
He is an idiot who cost his company business. The only spin is trying to downplay it at this point. The consequences are lost profits.
Let's be real. You mean he should have stayed out of it if he was going to voice an opinion that doesn't match yours. People don't want apolitical, they want an echo chamber.
You say it doesn't match that other users opinion, but doesn't it not match the vast majority of proton users opinions? Authoritarians aren't usually big on personal privacy. So praising one when you run a company based upon privacy is a dumb idea. It would be like running a vegan food company and praising people who like Slaughter cattle. It's a stupid fucking mindset. Which says a lot of things to me about his capacity as a CEO frankly. If he's this dumb why should people trust them to run a business they frequent?
No, he should stay out of either side because business is about making money. I don't want to know what politics you support. I don't care for politicizing everything. It is a fucking turn off.
You want my money, do your job, sell me your product, give me your service, but don't talk to me about your hot takes on politics. Also religion as well. I and many many other people don't want to hear it.
Better that they tell us imo. If someone thinks that the people I care about don't deserve to exist for reasons no one can control, I'd rather know and avoid giving them money than to help them quietly gain influence and power until they can eradicate these people themselves.
There is a certain logic to this. I tend to agree that I would like to know. I also think I would probably find out I would have to be self sufficient if I truly did not want to give to bad actors.
Your comment might hold a valid argument, if your previous comments hadn't made it perfectly clear you take issue with the fact he praised something a politician you don't like has done.
Whether you agree with my character or not what I said was accurate for any business person/enterprise. It is really not beneficial and increases risk unnecessarily.
It probably didn't help, but no, I don't think that was it. I think it was his sweeping generalizations about dems/republicans as a whole, along with the insinuation that dems were bought, republicans are "looking out for the little guys", and the election undermined the will of the people:
You are right about the generalization on parties, but the "little guy" he meant are small tech companies opposed to big tech. It was clear to me in the context, and to clear any doubt, he explicitly said that in a reddit comment.
I want to specify because this has been stretched on here as far as "he said republicans care for the working class".
That changes nothing.
Added for completeness. Lots of people got pissed because they assumed he meant that in general republicans stand with the little guy, prompting comments such as "what about trans/immigrants/etc.".
You did not do that, of course, but you can see how your comment could reinforce this opinion in people who didn't read the actual tweet and discussion and were just looking for reasons to get angry.