Manifestos, Fear, and 'Loser Thinking': Inside Proton's AI Reckoning
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Email (and VPN, password manager, etc.) is far too sensitive to go as all-in as they want to do on AI. I've been using Tuta in parallel with Proton, and I will probably migrate over completely soon
You should've stopped trusting them the moment it came out that the CEO was a T---p supporter, or at the very least, someone who plays politics, on Xitter of all platforms. Like, if they really cared about privacy and security and all that jazz, he shouldn't even be on that shitty platform in the first place, let alone tagging and sharing T---p's posts. That alone tells you the kind of person he is - would you trust a corporation run by that person?
It was only a matter of time their products turned to shit.
What do people recommend as truly good alternatives? Particularly non-American ones due to Snowden's revelations etc. etc.
It's best to think of email as fully public information anyway, use Signal for anything you care about.
1: https://www.privacyguides.org/en/email/#recommended-provider...
I get the feeling that in a few years even the options you suggested will have some sort of downside as well.
Doing a migration dance every few years is getting tiring and unsustainable for me.
Running my own mail server is going to be a losing race to keep me out of spam filters (which you tend find out after you discover that your mails are silently being dropped)
Honestly perhaps we should just migrate from e-mail altogether. The question is to what instead?
The mail server works great so far and their plans are super generous. Their web client is kinda shit and no mobile apps but any IMAP client will do the job fine.
Back to your question, I'm a happy user of Migadu.
I'm a Proton customer and other than some UX improvements I'm not missing any big features. This idea they need more velocity is a failure in management.
That's enough momentum to coast on for a very long time, especially since their whole deal is that they're owned by a nonprofit and don't even have shareholders to pressure them.
They really had to nothing and they'd won, the only way to lose in a situation like that is... exactly this. Andy could have probably just sat on his ass for 20 years like Gabe Newell and probably been able to buy a similar yacht at the end of it.
"had" is the right word.
Entrepreneurship isn't about building a company or even making money anymore, it's about the prestige of announcing that you either got into a selective incubator or that you raised. Minds corrupted by the panopticon.
What I can’t tolerate is if they stop putting security first, which it sounds like they are under Yen’s leadership.
Sounds so juvenile, worse than a teenager. Unfit for running a company dealing with secure mail.
The new upstart CEO taking on Hooli and making those comments ("bullshit and loser thinking")
Gavin Belson get's wind of it and out of fear implements their new AI policy: "Straight to Ship". Anything the engineers can think of just gets generated and immediately deployed with auto-marketing (with obvious humorous results).
Mostly because it's tends to be really obvious a company/individual is still deliberately cultivating a specific image, just with a different spin/target demographic than the stereotypically sterile, formal variant of corporate PR. But so many people eat it up.
In this case, doing a garden variety Elon-wannabe persona that's currently in vogue among the SV founder set. It's a really uncreative, lazy move for leaders doing cargo cult management. And cringe-y in general to imagine working for someone who unironically resembles the most over the top satire of tech leaders on HBO's Silicon Valley.
We've had 15+ years of hyper HR cancel culture espoused by Simon Sinek, Linked In and so on.
Perhaps this is just reversion to the mean?
One of my first bosses would throw keyboards at me and cuss me out nearly every hour. One of my favorites, in hindsight. Great guy. Just passionate, and overworked.
Learn not to jump to conclusions.
More than a couple of people with that attitude at any workplace and it's definitely not fun for almost everyone else.
At least one of the re-interviewees did that, and got a better paying job elsewhere. Good on them! They had 10-odd years of valuable systems knowledge, and we able to solve some complex environment issues quickly because of this. They weren't unique, but they were rare.
I guess I don't understand Proton's financial position. Are they not owned by the non-profit Proton Foundation? Why can they not just have slow and steady growth with an emphasis on security and quality?
The foundation has trustees, whose job is to ensure the goals of the foundation are being met, and they hire the CEO. In this case, one of the trustees is the CEO, which is a bit of a conflict of interest.
“Our legally binding purpose is to further the advancement of privacy, freedom, and democracy around the world. … We measure our return on investment not through financial metrics, but through impact.” (proton.me)
What more is there to say?
You just can't trust software being developed under such a man's leadership to be secure. It's a fatal mark against their raison d'etre.
Seeing this sentiment expressed by Proton's leadership may be enough for me to start transitioning away after eight years. Is Tuta a reasonable alternative to investigate first?
Only thing that might save their face is kicking Andy and following up with Japanese levels of corporate apologizing.
This is essentially what I wrote in the "reason for leaving" comment box when I cancelled my annual subscription. I'm sure many others have/will as well; I'm less sure Proton will course-correct before it's too late.
Everything else - and I mean everything else - is ancillary to that core function. Seeing a CEO openly throw security out the window in favor of Big Tech’s latest drug addiction is bad enough, but the CEO of a company whose entire reputation is bucking Big Tech? Inexcusable.
Already looking for exit strategies. I don’t want to give this prick one red cent of my money.
Leaving Proton has been in the back of my mind for a while, and this is probably the last straw for me. I've previously heard that Fastmail is good, but I'm interested in what others are doing. I agree with you that email privacy and security are top of the list. I don't care about a private AI feature (eg, Proton's Lumo), and I don't need their productivity suite (docs, sheets, meetings). Just do one thing really well.
Looking for others' input on the right way to offboard from Proton.
There are a number of email providers I looked at when switching. Ended up going with mailbox as I was more confident about privacy of a company in Germany than Australia and they were a bit cheaper. Posteo seems like a good option if you don't have your own domain. I also looked at Tuta, but their lack of import killed them as an option, I'm not signing up for a higher subscription level to get that feature.
Almost like where there's smoke, there's fire.
Uh-oh, I need to look for a different email provider now.
That's a deal breaker for me as well.
This has always been the case. Lack of transparency and dishonest, overzealous marketing.
I use Fastmail because they are at least honest about their limitations and Proton is completely overhyped in terms of the genuine privacy and security of their products. Good to know that beyond being mediocre they've confirmed it's all increasingly AI slop: "Ninety percent of code at Proton in October was written by AI"
Never trusted this company because of Andy, and never will.
On the other hand, I do see the situation their leadership is in, even though they're not handling it in a respectful way. If the company needs to provide competitive services vs. everyone else who is using AI, they're just going to get left behind. And even for security: like if their engineers are skeptical about adopting AI how can they protect their system in a world with Mythos and all other kinds of AI running around attacking them? I imagine their product would attract employees who are more skeptical about AI, which is hard to change . They need to find a balance between keeping with the spirit and principles of their product but not be in denial about the new world we live in.
Why not just build a damn good product that has a steady revenue stream? You don’t have to compete in a race to the bottom. There are other ways.
My email provider is boring. They do email and nothing else. Feature development is glacial but reliable. I doubt they’re rich. I doubt they’re tripling their ARR. But they have a stable business as best as I can tell and seem happy with it.
This whole “the only way to compete is to eat the world” is stupid and only makes things worse.
Rotfl there's even this idea that you need vibecoded crap to resist Mythos? Oh my freaking god.
Also, any time anything comes out it gives a clear impression that the leadership are bullies, from the CEO on down. That creates an environment in which people are afraid to speak up, which means issues get overlooked. Which isn't great for security either.
I would have absolutely no problem with a CEO setting a solid, well-founded direction about the use of AI to improve their products while keeping a foundation of security and privacy. But Yen just sounds like a Silicon Valley tokenmaxxing douchebag.
Another way of thinking about it is that it's really all these little bits together that make the situation seem so bleak. That level of aggressiveness regarding AI, the thing about not having enough velocity, the fact that it seems like a workplace where people are afraid to speak up--all that paints a picture that is basically the opposite of what I want out of the service. The whole brand, as I understood it, was that Proton was focused on security and privacy. I don't think the workplace described in that article really matches up to that brand.
Glad I hadn't really migrated mail to Proton yet, so now I can figure something else out. What's wild is a week ago I was actually thinking about expanding my subscription to their other products too.
Seems like dhh has a new pupil
Now we know it's run by a dick too.
They sold fear. That was all.
Should wait for and read Proton response before taking it seriously