Truly unhinged that they decided to come out on this. Fellas, you are fucking Swiss why throw yourself under the bus for the US election
this post was submitted on 15 Jan 2025
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Privacy
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Damn it my two year subscription just got refreshed...
This is amazing. People were perfectly okay with ignoring all the red flags in Proton and their products and really okay with buying all their bullshit, then a tweet saying Trump comes up and that's it. lol
🤷 sometimes people grumble quietly until a final straw is added to the stack. Not surprising.
Sooo, can we not create and/or finance our own? Please be gentle…but…is there not enough of us paying for proton and other privacy apps to fund a floss or non-profit version? I mean there are tech nerds all over this place, along with law nerds and political nerds…etc..(meant with love btw) that would have an instant user base.
I pledge here to sub up to $15usd/month for any lemmy person that starts an entity that provides us with what we need with ethics and morality of lemmy common.
I will continue to use Proton and their services, not because I support or endorse any political decisions from the CEO/board members (and I don't), but because they provide open source, secure, and private software that I love.
This is no different than arguing about using GrapheneOS based on the behavior of the maintainers.
Oh no... I use Graphene... what's the deal with the maintainers?
This video seemed to have been the start of an anti-GrapheneOS movement. I won't get into details, because it's been explained to death, but it's here for your convenience.
I use and love GrapheneOS as well.
Thanks for the video, much appreciated. Never paid much attention to the project beyond their website... and I'm glad that's as far as I've gone lol
OK I think I will move to Posteo. Great security, privacy focussed, servers in Germany, running with 100% renewable energy. Prices are ok, too. Ticks all boxes.
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using services based on the ceo's political leaning instead of actual features and policies of that service? that's dumb, tell me when that political leaning reflects in polices of proton then we can talk
I guess the assumption is that over time they inevitably will have an effect and people want to switch before that happens.
You're both right. I'd do the same to jump ship before the enshitification sets in. Often, I've seen how innocuous policy and feature changes creep in and before you know it, the switching costs are too high.
I had an app on my phone and one day they removed the export function. I only used it for backing up my data but when they raised rates and started slamming with ads, I wanted to leave but could not take my data with me. I ended to just uninstalling and starring over elsewhere.
Also, this is exactly what happened to reddit. They cut the api first so it was harder to take your communities and saved stuff with you.
why exactly is it inevitable? and why should we switch before it happens?
Tweet is from early december. Why is it blowing up now?
I guess on the one hand people are anxious about Trumps inaugeration and on the other hand this is a great opportunity for competitors or otherwise opposed people to launch an astroturfing campaign off of it.
When looking at posts titled has gone "full MAGA" for saying they feel Trump is more likely to enact antitrust rules against big tech than Democrats who let them down the past years, is just absurd.
It is the same line of reasoning like claiming the WHO to have been a chinese asset because they supported some of Chinas anti-Covid measures.
Misinformation. OP is advocating that you shoot yourself in the foot.
The CEO said something silly on Twitter which revealed either that (a) he shares an exceedingly banal opinion with literally half of America or (b) he's not above a bit of preemptive sycophancy to advance his (positive) anti-trust agenda.
There's nothing particularly scandalous in the offending tweet:
- Implying that the Democrats are now "the party of big business" is arguably true (and very boring)
- Implying that the Republicans now "stand for the little guys" is dumb but also arguably true, unfortunately - the working classes swung to Trump in the recent election while the Democrats are fast becoming a party of high-earning elites (which is why they lost)
- Saying that the antitrust actions began under Trump I is, well, true
Proton is not owned Zuck-like by its CEO. It's controlled by a foundation with other stakeholders on the board, including the inventor of the Web himself. In its niche it is still by far the best option. Ditching it for a nebulous non-existent alternative because the CEO expressed a dumb and extremely commonplace opinion is just silly and self-defeating.
PS: to be clear, OP is peddling misinformation because it's not true that "Proton took the stance" of anything. It's the personal opinion of the CEO that's at issue. It's a major distinction. I find it disappointing that people interested in privacy would have such little respect for a private individual's right to have their own thoughts.
PPS: to be extra clear, my comments are about the post above, not stuff that people are reading elsewhere. But the substance stands. See discussion for detail.
Nailed it, Americans get so offended and divided on these issues that they just throw reason and logic out the window
I find it disappointing that people interested in privacy would have such little respect for a private individual’s right to have their own thoughts.
Ding ding ding.
It seems the vast majority of people do NOT want to allow speech they don't like, no matter the consequences. That requires too much forward thinking. Excuse me while I watch history repeat itself...
Oh I want him to be allowed to speak his mind. I just don't want to give a Trumpet any money, and especially not after their annoucement of a crypto wallet and ventures into AI crap.
Free speech doesn't mean I should spend my money there.
Yes I tend to share your analysis.
I largely agree with what you’re saying, except the official Proton Mastadon account doubled down on that personal opinion. That seems pretty clear that it’s endorsed not just by that one individual on the board.
Link to Mastodon thread: https://mastodon.social/@protonprivacy/113833073219145503
Archives in case they delete it:
https://web.archive.org/web/20250115165213/https://mastodon.social/@protonprivacy/113833073219145503
Text copy of their post:
Corporate capture of Dems is real. In 2022, we campaigned extensively in the US for anti-trust legislation.
Two bills were ready, with bipartisan support. Chuck Schumer (who coincidently has two daughters working as big tech lobbyists) refused to bring the bills for a vote.
At a 2024 event covering antitrust remedies, out of all the invited senators, just a single one showed up - JD Vance.
By working on the front lines of many policy issues, we have seen the shift between Dems and Republicans over the past decade first hand.
Dems had a choice between the progressive wing (Bernie Sanders, etc), versus corporate Dems, but in the end money won and constituents lost.
Until corporate Dems are thrown out, the reality is that Republicans remain more likely to tackle Big Tech abuses.
Looks like backing up the post was a good call.
Just puked a little after reading that.
Here’s what I don’t get: if the leadership at Proton believes this shit, why share it on social media at all? It clearly isn’t going to make anyone in the left happy. Are they trying to capture porn-loving MAGA?
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It isn't misinformation.
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Someone like this board member being a traitor to his species isn't covered by "opinion". No normalizing nazis. It's such a low bar. He couldn't clear it.
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He blasted his treachery over the public airwaves. His privacy isn't being violated.
This whole comment feels like an exercise in using all the best words to miss the point. We know, as does this probably-lying board member, that Republicans are only going to go more authoritarian, and the only reason they would pretend to care about big tech abuses is to grab the steering wheel from them to commit far worse abuses. No company that gets into bed with traitors is going to become the new center of my digital life.
Tuta for email, syncthing for photos bc I'm not self-hosting, mullvad for VPN.
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I love how you’re claiming misinformation while posting misinformation. It’s not the CEO, it’s a board member. That said, the company also officially posted these ideas on their Bluesky account.
This isn’t a “CEO” expressing a belief, it’s the board, and now the official company line.
I’m not disagreeing with their post particularly on corporate dems, but this is a company and not a persons sole belief.
Also, if dems are the party of big business then why are all these big businesses donating to Trump? Does that just mean republicans are the party of even bigger business?
Their bullet points are spin-doctoring.
Also the comment got a few dozen upvotes almost immediately. Suspicious.
I was thinking the same thing. In all the threads about it. It just seemed oddly suspicious and not typical of what the digital privacy community has typically believed… I mean, I’m also not going to homogenize a community like that though and Proton has been a mainstay.
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Implying that the Democrats are now "the party of big business" is arguably true (and very boring)
While true in some scenarios, in anti-trust Lina khan's ftc has done significantly more than trump ever did. Biden keeping her over the protest of countless business execs and daily articles in the wall street journal on how she's ruining America shows some commitment to prosecuting big tech.
Meanwhile, trump's anti-trust moves were mostly based off petty issues he had with the ceos or the platforms having a "liberal bias". Now that every big tech ceo has fallen in line and given him $1 million for his inauguration I doubt we'll see much movement on that front.
From what I remember pre-election news was saying wealthy dems/dem donors wanted Biden (and Kamala in some report I saw) gone primarily because they didn’t like what Lina Khan was doing. There were also questions about whether Kamala would continue to support Lina Khan after receiving donations from wealthy donors. JD Vance praised her work and it sounds like the Trump nomination is going to continue similarly.
I don’t like Trump at all and I know how petty and sycophantic he can be, but this may end up being one case where I end up preferring the result on this one specific issue over what we may have had if the dems had won without Kamala or if she flipped and agreed to drop Khan. I won’t really know how I feel about this selection until I see the result.
(Quick search turned these examples up that I’ve only skimmed, but I need to log off: https://www.politico.com/news/2024/10/24/kamala-harris-lina-khan-00185345 https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/kamala-harris-rich-donors-lina-khan/)
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In all seriousness, I genuinely feel like the demographics of those making over 250K/year outside of Silicon Valley (proton is from Switzerland which is a center-right country), and outside of the arts industries, is probably bare minimum of lib-center, and probably most likely to be at least fiscally conservative, if not socially as well. Those kind of people are more concerned with maintaining their financial position than the issues plaguing the income classes that the individual has graduated out of.
I don’t think you’re going to find many CEOs that aren’t at least a little right of center or self serving in their business interests.
Getting to the top 1% income bracket is a lot easier than maintaining that financial position.
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