this post was submitted on 24 Oct 2024
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DeGoogle Yourself
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I'm hearing about proton but they feel very scummy. Is proton(vpn and mail) actually privacy centered, doesn't log and doesn't sell data?
While I tought about self hosting an email, but doesn't that come with lots of problems, like you can't garantee five nines of uptime, or someone emails you cp, or websites not accepting custom domains? I also heard it's easly hackable.
Proton were forced by swiss court order to log the IP address of a climate activist, which led to his arrest, but as far as we know they never actually breached his encrypted emails.
Tuta had a similar incident, but due to being based in Germany, had to go farther, and allowed access to any emails that weren't encrypted for the court ordered individual.
That only matters if you believe you will be a person of interest for your government, and the lesson is that no email service is perfectly safe for things that require that level of protection.
For most of us, any of the private emails will be fine, and are certainly better than Google.
Yeah, they were able (and thus legally required) to hand over the user's recovery email address, which is what got them caught. You don't need to enter a recovery email address, and you can of course choose to use an equally-secure service for recovery.
One big technical issue to note is that Proton doesn't use end-to-end encryption for email headers, which includes recipients and subject lines, among other things. So that's potentially exposed to law enforcement as well. I believe Tuta does encrypt headers.
Yeah, I'm not "that guy". I'd just like to get my money's worth. Thanks for the highlights.
I’ve been using proton for a couple years now. I trust and like the services they provide. Plus they regularly perform third party audits and make the results public. https://protonvpn.com/blog/no-logs-audit
May I ask what triggers thr scummy feeling for you?
It looks way to much like big corp. And money corrupts. Why do I get a calendar, a vaul, a vpn, and a mail service for free. I know it's limited services, but for free? I feel like I must be the product.
I get when it's a non-profit, or living off donations, but Proton is either of those
This is exactly the reason that Proton became a non-profit:
https://proton.me/blog/proton-non-profit-foundation
Proton is still a for-profit company. However, there is now the non-profit Proton Foundation that is the largest shareholder of the Proton company (not necessarily majority shareholder).
Plus, non-profits are not guaranteed to be positive. See OpenAI for example.
Edit: Grammar
I don't think the free accounts cost them a whole lot. You only get 1GB of mail space, and the free versions have minimal features (e.g. you can only create one email filter). They make their money on paid accounts, which seems legit to me.
To be fair, the Proton Foundation is a non-profit and is the majority shareholder of Proton.
The foundation is the largest shareholder, but Proton has not specified whether it controls a majority.
That's fair. Though the free service is more of an infinite trial tbh