I'm a Proton employee and I'm breaking my silence | Hacker News Reader

I'm a Proton employee and I'm breaking my silence

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59 pointsLLcolD33 comments

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> so here's the actual quote in context (unlike the leakers, I have permission to post this image)

Worth keeping in mind that his post was reviewed and vetted by Proton management

At minimum

> Worth keeping in mind that his post was reviewed and vetted by Proton management

yeah as soon as i read "i'm breaking my silence" i immediately though "yeah sure bro, sure".

if this is vetted and approved by management it's been most likely edited or distorted.

and i say this without even have read the post (I don't need to).

chances are this post is, at best, corporate damage control.

EDIT: i'm reading the post. yep, it's corporate damage control.

> "this is the last year that we hire engineers”

and then:

> It means we stop hiring engineers who just code, and hire instead product engineers

classic nonsensical corporate upper-management bullshit.

As someone commented:

> The only reason I'm with Proton is security. If I wanted new features, and AI in my email I'd just stay with Gmail. They objectively do it better.

Same here and I'm looking to move at the end of my subscription.

I cannot relate to being emotionally invested in my employer to the extent that “feeling the need to break my silence” crosses my mind. Siemens is a great company but am I weird for turning my phone off at 4 o’clock.

> I cannot relate to being emotionally invested in my employer to the extent that “feeling the need to break my silence” crosses my mind.

It seems likely to me that this is also true for the Proton employees. (Though FWIW, I've had a few employers that I would absolutely proactively defend, but they are not surprisingly the same set of employers I don't think would ever need such a defense, and none of them were large companies).

I haven't been paying attention to any of this drama because I don't use Proton mail and thus don't care, but one of the screenshots on the linked reddit post that they seem to believe is exonerating the company has what appears to be the CEO of the company (I assume "Andy" is Andy Yen based on the name and profile picture) telling an employee to get on reddit with their personal account and "set the record straight".

After seeing that, I don't know how anyone is supposed to assume that anything any Proton employee says in public is anything other than PR spin originating directly from the CEO, so I don't know what kind of value any of us is supposed to get from reading any such testimony.

Absolutely. And the bigger problem is that if you can't work for a dirty company, you can't work (replace work with whatever other activity). It's much more productive to take a "one dirty hand can wash another" perspective instead of this "an eye for an eye makes the whole world blind" mentality we see so much of.

This whole post looks like PR damage control and not an employee “breaking silence”. Also there’s not a thing about the CEO calling his employees losers to try to make them output more code by using AI more. Also looks like it was heavily bot-upvoted, both the thread and the initial positive comments. The whole thing makes me trust proton even less

ProtonMail mangles emails in a way that they are impossible to download as they were delivered to their servers, meaning MIME signatures cannot be verified, because the emails are altered.

Old issue, affects also web UI not only bridge:

https://web.archive.org/web/20240221213617/https://github.co...

Would you use a secure email service that breaks signature verification on received emails? There were a lot of smaller and bigger things along the years, but realizing I could not verify authenticity of signed emails for apparently no reason pushed me over threshold to leave them.

Reddit is soon to be login walled, but the summary of this post is that Proton's not that bad because random people said it wasn't. No actual information is provided.

This is a PR-style "refutation" that uses a lot of words to make it seem like it has addressed some issue. I'll just quote one of the reddit comments that is also exactly my reaction:

  if OP isn't some PR account (or andy's alt account) I will eat my hat. none of OP's responses deal with the actual complaints.

PS: cliches like "breaking my silence" / "speaking my truth" etc should result in an automatic 20-point deduction to all bayesian priors for authenticity and trustworthiness

It looks like they are attacking the "leaker" instead of addressing the leaked issues? They clearly don't refute that Andy actually did tell employees to stop writing code and to ship faster with AI, and they don't refute the "loser" comment. It looks like damage control through shit-stirring and a poor attempt at a Gish gallop.

Yeah I'd definitely want to hear the other side of the story before jumping to conclusions on that "biased attack piece" that made its rounds (it's very possible Proton is indeed in the wrong and can be fairly criticized, but I've seen enough conflicts like this where I want to hear what the other side says before rushing to judgment, especially about a tech company which was otherwise liked by a lot on HN it seems)

How brave of you to defend your CEO's incompetence.

Any alternatives folks can recommend? I myself am considering switching from protonmail to fastmail.

I’m looking for something hassle-free and “not google”.

I switched years back and have only wondered why I didn’t do it sooner.

Fastmail is great, my one downside being that it charges per-account (to be clear, you can have unlimited aliases on that account), so if you want multiple accounts, e.x. for homelab stuff, your paying full price for each.

I also use purelymail for the above reason, and while it's barebones I've been quite happy with it.

Tuta is the obvious choice if you don’t mind using their client.

Been using fastmail since 2013 and before that hosting my own for about 15 years. I feel fastmail does a lot of things right, for example one near and dear to my heart is proper alias handling in the webmail interface. I think my only complaint is that they rolled out IMAP compatible 'notes/memo' for emails, but you can't use it unless you use the grouped conversation thingy which I don't like.

Also I get the vibe that the company treats their employees properly and not like disposable trash.

Though I'd be curious how they're using AI.

I'd like to call attention to a comment by another employee in that same thread: https://www.reddit.com/r/ProtonMail/s/mZY98QqNMv

Felt a touch refreshing.

Ugh, I was just about to move from self hosted bitwarden to protonpass. I dont want 1password. Alternatives?

keepassxc

What was wrong with self-hosted? I self-host using KeepassXC. Yes you have to set up syncing across devices more or less yourself, but it’s just one file per password database, and an LLM can help automate that if you need the help. I can’t imagine switching to some cloud service for something so critical, especially now.

2FAS Pass

https://2fas.com/pass/

Isn't embracing AI expected in a software company?

Those who don't catch up will lose.

This is a niche in which I do t exactly think speed of development and new bling is particularly important.

Either thy drop encryption and just become Google Suite competitor, or they stick to the original differentiator. Looks like they want both and the customers for each are different targets.

I'm sure this person was told to post on Reddit using their personal account (as the original 404 article showed).

You can't trust anything ... anyone ... says at Proton. That leak shattered any faith anyone has in the company.

It's clear the company places profit above customers. The CEO calls their own employees losers. The CEO thinks writing code by hand is like using a fax machine in 2026.

Fuck Andy, and fuck Proton.

>some of the criticism hurts me because it described a company I don't recognize

Haven't really done much research, but this resonates - the vibes on these recent news reports felt very off.

It felt engineered frankly, which makes me quite suspicious in a world where everyone seems to be pushing for encryption backdoors. The one email provider famous for strong encryption suddenly gets a broad PR across entire media landscape?

...zero evidence but the whole thing just feels off AF

if true, seems like a kiss-ass who can't be trusted

I'd think there are a LOT of interest behind closed door wanting to shut down projects like proton.

Proton collaborates with spy agencies. They want it to have more of the users who aren't using Gmail.

Every company has to collaborate with spy agencies. Majn difference vs. Gmail or most others is for email and files Proton have no information to give except the IP you used (really hard for users to mask), and they seem to deny VPN activity logs 100% of the time.

If you're a criminal that has nation state actors after you I'm not sure what service I'd recommend. For most every other person Proton is way more than private enough.

https://proton.me/legal/transparency

I think I'm with some of the other commenters in that there seems to be an oddly smelling smear campaign against them right now.

For non proton to proton messages, they can view the entire message that is sent and can store it or whatever. You cannot rely on some transparency report since there are gag orders and what not.

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