I keep hearing bad stuff about proton, but I don’t really get most of it. Could someone please explain all of the controversy to me. Lastly, what are the best alternatives to all of their services?
First and foremost any for-profit organization on a long enough trend line tends to inshitify, and proton is a for-profit organization masquerading as a not-for-profit one ( it has an NPO in its Advisory Board).
So I don’t want to rely on any one platform vendor or Cloud host or point of failure for my privacy and my productivity, not after Google, never again. Even if I allow a few components of proton into my text act, I wouldn’t want to be locked into the ecosystem.
Second, it’s leadership has said permissive things about fascists in my country in the past few years. They have donated to political organizations I do not want to align with their values and interests are not necessarily mine.
For those reasons, I use one vendor with European hosting for my password manager, a different one for my email and calendar, (Tutanota) and I am actively evaluating what office and productivity Suite I will use going forward , but currently just use Libra office wherever I need it and cryptpad when I need to quickly share something in a table or document with people over the internet.
VPN and privacy apps come from DuckDuckGo for great about not retaining my info.
Myself host my photos (Immich) and files using free open source software projects , along with my media library through Jellyfin.
Its pretty slow and clunky for an email service. On a whim, I made an account with https://posteo.de/en. Performance and interface is much better.
Lost a discord acc because my proton email got annihilated after I left it to rot. Very sad.
Nothing, people just hold on to the CEO bullshit take on US politics, which was said in early 2025, which is almost 2 years ago at this point.
Tldr: emotion-driven incels making a scene for a non-issue, but i can understand why bcuz USA republicans are a cancer to the world like Israel.
people just hold on to the CEO bullshit take on US politics
…echoed and reinforced by Proton’s business account. That’s not a nothingburger. Trust is a privacy company’s greatest asset - and an asset easily destroyed if the company is found to have political leanings that are inherently adverse to privacy and freedom.
which is almost 2 years ago at this point
The last time I thought this was a long duration my mom made my lunches for me
Valid for certain things, but holding on to things of lesser importance doesnt make you an adult, it makes you resentful
How about holding on to the insult ‘incel’ for people who don’t want to feed fascists their dollar
Ok, but you realize that 2025 was already post-election, and Trump started doing horrible shit from day 1. So if someone supported him in 2025, odds are their opinion hasn’t changed much. Which makes them garbage.
Proton’s CEO loves republicans and supports fascist influencers.
Murena (Mail, Cloud, Workspace, Vault, Galery, Office suite, Tasks, Calendar, Notes, Phones (FairPhone), e/OS, e/Os for kids), OpenSource, encrypted, made in the EU (France)
It would be nice if their home page showed anything about anyhting, like about what they do and who they are instead of redirecting to a completely sterile login page.
This is their Homepage, there you find all info. The other I posted was the Page for the workspace. Murena is a whole infrastructure of services, hard- and software. all privacy centred, green energy, collaborations from third party in Murena are NextCloud (Germany), for the Cloud service and FairPhone (Netherland). All services are OpenSource, nothing shady in it.
Ah, that is much better, thank you! Strange I haven’t heard of them before.
Proton is Israel’s bitch.
Proton is Israel’s bitch.
Wait, what? They are dealing/ having contracts with Israel companies or its government?
There are internet blacklists, several dozen, purportedly for scammers, and Israel is dropping their critics on them, and proton takes it at face value, with no appeal option.
Plus the US gave them lists of accounts to deleted and they did. They are bitches.
- Image related
Ceo is a trumper
Email - Tuta Mail
VPN - IVPN
Drive - Selfhost Nextcloud or Tuta Drive
Calendar - Selfhost Nextcloud or Tuta Calendar
Docs/Sheets - Selfhost Nextcloud or LibreOffice (offline)
Pass - Bitwarden or KeePassXC (offline)
Authenticator - 2FA or Aegis (both are offline but that’s a good thing with 2FA)
Meet - Jitsi
Lumo - Local AI or Kagi Assistant (paid, comes with privacy-focused search engine) or Duck.ai (free)
What happened to mullvad? It used to be protonvpn and them as default recommendations, now it’s another two.
One of two Mullvad CEOs personally donated 5,000,000 SEK (~500K USD) to the Swedish Örebro party, who support ethnic cleansing. “Sweden is for the Swedes”.
Mullvad’s response was just fence-sitting on the issue.
By paying for Mullvad, you are funding the man who donated to the far-right Örebro party, and likely will again.
I’ve been curious about Nextcloud as a self hosted storage area. But I’ve not really found clear information if my use case works well with it. I have more or less just a network share that plenty of services and sources has access to (immich, local computers, syncthing, jellyfin etc.) but as I understand it Nextcloud doesn’t like files being modified externally as it keeps quite hefty indexing of all the files. But I’ve also heard you can mount “external” storage in Nextcloud that it would be less mad about.
Drive: Filen, Jottacloud
VPN: NymVPN
NymVPN is too new for me to feel comfortable using personally. Also it seems that they worked with Brave which I’m certainly not a fan of.
I wouldn’t recommend Jottacloud as their privacy policy seems iffy and they don’t have e2ee.
Filen’s privacy policy seems better, although they do say they do analytics. They do have e2ee though. Definitely much closer to Tuta than Jottacloud.
I once saw people also recommend airvpn in the same context as ivpn, do they also have some issues or are they just too unknown?
I like IVPN because it feels like a pretty drop-in replacement for Mullvad. It’s also available on Accrescent which is great for anyone using GrapheneOS.
As for AirVPN, I thought you needed an email to sign up but after checking their sign up page, it seems you can enter whatever string you want for your email.
They also support port forwarding unlike IVPN so if that’s super important to you maybe AirVPN is the way to go.
It also seems AirVPN is slightly cheaper year by year and significantly cheaper if you buy 3 years at a time.
AirVPN has never had an independent security audit though, so if that concerns you IVPN is the way to go.
Otherwise, it seems like AirVPN is a real contender if you’re worried about price and/or port forwarding. Maybe I’ll give both of them a try before I commit to one (still waiting for my Mullvad days to run out).
Yes. There is controversy about the CEO. But mostly for me: is security theater. And in don’t trust them. Email will never work as a secure communication layer. Stop pretending it will. There a reasons which is tied to the protocol level, that make pgp non sufficient. There are also the pgp technology it self (no forward secrecy, no deniability, key management etc). Then there is the obvious fact about an email from proton to gmail, and 99% of other email providers, simply not being secure/encrypted. So you buy a privacy tool, which neglects to tell you: we actually don’t provide privacy at all - unless you treat proton emails as proton chat - strictly proton to proton… at which point youd be better of with e g signal.
If you insist: mailfence.org allows you to upload and control you own pgp keys. That’s interoprational with proton. Simarly priced i think, also Schweiz, and a bit more honest and strict imap (no bridge). But honestly… stop treating email as secure.
What’s insufficient about PGP?
Its crypto from the 90s and email is not meant to be secure. Some examples:
Only the mail body is protected, headers and metadata arent, so an attacker still knows with who you are talking about what.
Replies contain the full thread, if one person messes up once, the entire chain is unencrypted.
No ephemeral keys, no cleanly defined rotation mechanism. If someone gets your key, all past messages are also accessible.
It depends on your threat model. The actual crypto portion of it holds up, at least until we have crypto-relevant quantum computers.
If you want anonymization and PFS for basic messaging, yeah PGP + email isn’t going to cut it. But if you’re sending documents, for example, with financial or health data tied to my identity anyway, I’d take PGP with my own email provider over TLS to some tech company servers where it sits unencrypted any day.
so an attacker still knows with who you are talking about what.
>implying i fill out the subject box with anything meaningful 🤪
TY for informing me. Is there a better alternative to PGP even with the other downsides of email you listed?
Signal is probably best, since it has volume to hide in, and it’s difficult/ impossible to screw up. Partly because it’s centralized. Which is the problem with e.g mateix protocol - each node can configure thi gs a bit differently. Also why you should use the official app imo.
This is a decent walk through: https://www.privacyguides.org/en/basics/email-security/
But simple duckduckgoing can provide much more
https://5blockchains.com/posts/pgp-vs-signal/
https://ubos.tech/news/pgp-encryption-security-crisis-why-cryptography-needs-modern-alternatives/ (feels a bit clanker like - but info is legit)
I would say Signal is the best like mainstream normie friendly option but if you want the most reliable privacy imo your better off with Briar. It’s less convenient for sure, but it requires no phone number, has no centralized servers, can route messages over TOR, Bluetooth, LAN, etc. Messages are end to end encrypted peer to peer. And even when stored on your device are encrypted. Downside is you need the other person to have an android there is no iOS app. But upside is it has a flatpak!
I like briar for sure. Mostly because it might work if the internet goes blip, and you only have p2p. But… It’s in maintenance mode, exactly because its not easy to use.
For me it’s their ransomware-like business model of: attracting new users with free accounts, incentivizing them to migrate their Gmail inbox to Proton (Easy Switch), encrypting the content (“for security”), and then letting them find out that a paid feature (Bridge) is necessary to integrate the mailbox into a third-party client like Thunderbird (as a decryption layer in between); well, unless you want to manually export the mailbox using their Mail Export Tool. I’m not opposed to paying for a service (I also donate to Disroot), but I dropped them like a hot brick when I found out: thankfully not the hard way (I tested integration before migration).
There’s nothing inherently bad about it.
I use their cloud storage (and docs occasionally), a different VPN service, and a different email provider. Don’t put all your eggs in one basket as another user here said.
It is “purple google” as yet another user said, but that’s one thing that makes it great. It’s not harvesting all your personal data like google does, but provides a similar service.
*poogle
proton is purple google
This is my personal opinion and only that, my opinion. If your options are proton or Google, proton. If you have the ability, technical ability (in some cases), and mental bandwidth to diversify those services, that’s even better. And if you want to securely and properly self host your own options that match your specific threat level, that’s the best.
I personally use paid proton for my email. I occasionally use the free VPN, and I have several things in their drive as a backup to my backup of my backup. I personally would not put all my eggs in the proton basket because I did that in the past with Google and if we’re ignoring the privacy portion, they have discontinued so many things over the years that I learned not to put ALL my faith in ONE company.
Edit to add, I also didn’t even touch the CEO thing but I see several others have. If we account for that, I’d still say it’s significantly better than Google.
You are comparing them to google? Like, compare the president to hitler, fuck off.
Fuck off again. Proton is garbage Israeli cuck fuckers.
