They screwed up, admitted it, apologized, don't see why people are calling for blood anymore. People are allowed to make mistakes, they owned it and they cut ties with the guy.

I feel like this is a good statement. The one that should have been written immediately after outrage began, and ideally before removing dozens if not hundreds of posts and comments covering this topic.

Some people say it stinks of AI. I don't know. Maybe? PR messages have always been like this, and they seem to be one of the types that chatbots got most of their writing patterns from.

Some people definitely overreacted. Others completely missed the point. Proton is far from a perfect company, and a case in favour of boycotting them could be made. But not because they accidentally sponsored one video of a far-right youtuber.

They're just not as private and secure as they pretend to be or to want to be. Pretty much all alternatives are leagues above. There appears to be no apparent reason why they're lagging behind. I suppose that's where the CIA honeypot allegations may come from.

In any case, if you really care about privacy and security - you probably aren't a Proton user, let alone customer. And if you are - I highly recommend trying alternatives that don't have a long history of working with law enforcement.

I loved proton years ago... even did a paid account for a while. This isn't their first wtf moment and won't be their last. The problem for me, its that I expect more carefulness and thoughtfulness from a company that promotes encryption and privacy.

Showing me how easily you make mistakes is a quick way for me to question how well you're safeguarding the platform.

I've moved away. Will take some time for them to earn back the trust, but honestly... I don't see a huge need for them anymore. I simply don't consider email secure. If you want real secure communication (that you can host on a server yourself) Matrix and XMPP are a much better choice.

Anyway... the response is nice. Just doesn't fix anything.

As I mentioned more in detail in other post, Proton is not the pro-MAGA many had misinterpreted. It is just sloppy at the marketing campaign and its leader makes statements that can easily misunderstood too.

That said, Proton has decided to aim for the masses, which has proven to be a winning business formula here. However, in that quest, it's natural that concerns from top-tier privacy users (Linux users, those wanting non-Google push notifications, too-many-eggs-in-a-basket, etc.) get relegated in favor of the bulk of their primary target customers, the regular Joe who simply wants to move away from email and web traffic scraping. We should all applaud that decision, but we also recognize the limitations and big risks of having a single company holding some 80% of this privacy market, both for us and even for Proton. It would be better to foster a healthy, diverse, and more equitable privacy ecosystem.

Personally can't wait until thundermail has a free tier

"you're right to raise this" really triggers my AI detection Spidey senses. Sounds like Claude, specifically.

This response is unfeeling and reactive Claude slop. Proton doesn't care. They're working to avoid being in trouble.