Do you have to hate Proton now? Of course not. But you should be getting some warning lights that the company being advertised and the company Andy Yen wants to run seem to be at odds with each other.

I literally made a post about ditching Proton the other day, you may have even seen it

Amongst other things, and probably an unpopular opinion in this community, I am not important. Adblock and what I think of as good internet habits shield me from the worst that "spying" could do to me and the number of personal email correspondancea I have in a year totals to probably less than three messages. What I'm saying, humbly, is that I could switch back to Google tomorrow without much harm. I never used the VPN. I never used the Drive. Proton Pass and maybe some storage space in the Email were the only things of value from my subscription and not worth $13/month in a fair market. My support for Proton was more of a protest against Big Tech than a dire need for E2E "based in Switzerland" Encryption. But if Andy Yen wants to act like Big Tech, I'll treat him like Big Tech.

CEO AI shareholder simp, has Protons security protocols lapsed

A quick note that Proton isn't public and is managed by a non-profit board of trustees, who seem content to let Andy Yen do whatever he wants (no matter how at odds it is to the company mission). No shareholders.

The second point is up for debate, but yeah, IMO, they have. Calling your engineers "losers" for suggesting that AI-written code be tested before shipping and adopting a "more revenue above all else" mindset is a usual indication of security protocols being ignored, but you'll never know the answer to this question until it's too late. I would rather be the frog that jumped too early.

Yes, you are required to do what the Internet hive mind demands of you, or you'll have to give up your "Netizen" card.

The only real solution for email is to own your own domain.
Then you can move email providers without changing email addresses.

I don't use them for email but I have a bit over a year left of their VPN service already paid for.
I'll probably switch before it's over unless they change course.

constantly changing emails as your main is exhausting

Buy a domain. Point it to your email provider. Want to swap providers? You can at any time, email address unaffected

You don't have to think like everyone else - in fact, I'd recommend you don't. Assess the situation and form your own opinion

No one has to hate anything. You decide for yourself.

I mostly moved away from Proton last January when I got tired of their lack of Linux support.

With the recent news about Proton's (and Tuta's) push for AI, no freaking way will I pay for those services again.

My trust in them has dropped significantly with the recent events.

You can't have privacy without security, and security requires every piece to be secure, not just the backend. All your emails are one xss away from being dumped, regardless of whatever encryption is used.
Why should I trust them to make secure products when their culture is to bully the employees who suggest testing the security of these products?

Aside from not wanting to support the shitty behaviour of mocking their employees, I can't even trust that they're taking security seriously anymore.

If you believe it was a simple mistake and that they'll take things more seriously going forward, that's up to you.
But personally I'm looking into setting up a self-hosted system before my current subscription ends. Can't trust anyone these days.

You don't have to do anything. However, under the circumstances, Proton and its ecosystem are becoming less recommendable.

My personal suggestions for alternatives:

• Proton --> Drop-in(ish) Replacement, What I Use, Future-Proof(ish)
• Proton Mail --> Tuta Mail, Posteo, Self-hosted/pubnix email
• Proton VPN --> IVPN, IVPN, Self-hosted VPN
• Proton Drive --> Tuta Drive or Filen, Syncthing, Syncthing
• Proton Pass --> Bitwarden, KeePass, KeePass
• Proton Docs --> Nextcloud Docs, LibreOffice, ???
• Proton Wallet --> Cake Wallet, Nothing, ???
• Proton Auth --> Ente Auth, Aegis / OTPClient, Aegis / OTPClient / FreeOTP
• Lumo --> Duck.ai, Nothing, Nothing or Ollama

I get anger I get having morals but constantly changing emails as your main is exhausting. the features Proton offers for me have always worked and worked great.

The problem is that with the plans and ideas Andy Yen are proposing, it seems very likely that it will not work so great in the future. It works now, and I say that as a (non-paying) reluctant Proton user, and it is the best non-personal domain alternative out there, but "for now" is the key words here.

So the hatred is more of a warranted fear of the future (and of course hatred against Andy Yen being yet another carbon copy arrogant AI-techbro CEO).

AFAIK, no, the security is fine for their various services. For now at least. Pushing to slop out more AI code is probably not going to effect quality and security positively.

I definitely get where you are coming from, and it’s difficult if not impossible to have every thing and every service you use be ‘morally good’

So you pick and choose. I’ve been working to switch everything to my own domain, and then I have a mail host or if I really had to could pose my own, for instance, but it’s not easy.

Is your hivemind downlink faulty? You may need to get your thought chip repaired or replaced.

Works great, $12/mo. for mail/VPN/password manager, and no AI or surveillance bullshit… yet. If they did, I’m outie 5000 today, but only because those features annoy the hell out of me, not for any existential desire to protest them.

I just can’t be bothered to give a flying fuck what shitty corporate sophistry some CEO is orally farting out of his facial anus.

I probably need to continue with them for VPN, but will probably move to Tuta eventually. I don't particularly hate them and I do still see their work and products as of quality. Just the CEO sucks.

Unless they drop Andy Yen, yes.

It seems like a lot of lemmings have moved to Mailbox.org or Fastmail. I just moved to Tuta but I am considering jumping to Mailbox.

You can use Proton Mail Bridge with imapsync to migrate easily from Proton.

I have a mail subscription with them until May. At which point I will assess the market and if there has been any change or coverage of the internal goings on at the company. I may not commit to a long term subscription and drop to monthly if the goings on arent clear

I don't hate Proton, but I have no intention of ever trusting them. It helps that I don't have to deal with the sunk cost fallacy as I hadn't switched to then yet when the Trump appointment comment happened and seemed like a warning to me. Add sponsoring far right YouTube channels and a toxic CEO who wants quantity over quality and security. Why would anyone reasonable trust them as long as he's in charge?

Hopefully they make whatshisname die on his sword (figuratively, just fire the neonazi(maybe) prick if that's the issue, get not trusting, who can you?). Best I can tell no major breaches, probably still doesn't keep logs (coz that's good legally).

That said, it's a nice VPN, for the price, that allows a port open and gives a 500GB offsite backup (locally encrypted, natch) and email (I care not about their Google Suite equivalent as long as it doesn't break security).

But in general don't let anyone centralize your failure points, get ye a domain that points at an email provider that you can change on a whim. No, email will never be secure without a willing (encryption and there's GPG if you know) partner, that's all BS.

You don't have to, but generally hating fascists is recommended.

"we" dont hate Proton.

Its a loud minority, some upvotes then and others ignore those comment so you get an impression its consensus judging by upvotes. (at least this is my theory)

It took me some time to understand what you're talking about e-mail server. My first thought was about the Wine (... not emulator) fork.

It's fine.