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Proton Mail goes AI, security-focused userbase goes ‘what on earth’ (pivot-to-ai.com)

submitted 5 months ago by dgerard@awful.systems to c/techtakes@awful.systems

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we appear to be the first to write up the outrage coherently too. much thanks to the illustrious @self

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[–] fasterandworse@awful.systems 18 points 5 months ago (1 children)

it all stinks so much. He calls it "opt-in" but the official description of that opt-in is:

If you try to use Proton Scribe, you will be prompted to chose between local and server-side. So, technically, it's not active until you decide how, and if, you want to use it.

as you can see here: https://mastodon.social/@protonprivacy/112807462045101580

there is opt-in and then there is dangling an expired hotdog

[–] self@awful.systems 13 points 5 months ago

holy fuck that’s worse than I thought

so going back to not being able to recommend Proton to anyone again: there’s now a button (and associated “tutorial” advertising modals trying to get the user to click the button, don’t pretend there won’t be) that when clicked gives the user a confusing choice between an option that might not work and one that exfiltrates their data and claims it doesn’t (if they even get this choice on a computer that doesn’t support the local LLM), and if they interact with that it just opts them into the feature in a state that may or may not (but by default does) expose the plaintext of their messages to Proton’s servers

and I’m supposed to recommend this horseshit to non-technical users? what’s that sound like, I wonder? “oh it’s a great privacy-oriented mail service you should pay for — but not for your business because you might fuck up and exfiltrate your data, and also there’s a chance they’ll enable the same feature for regular users at some unspecified time in the future so look out for that. oh and don’t get visionary either.” yeah fuck that