Andy Yen’s values are incompatible with Proton’s mission. He advocates for poor security practices, supports fascists, and he verbally abuses his subordinates. As such, I can no longer in good conscience continue to financially support a company with such terrible leadership.
Unfortunately for me, my subscription just renewed last month on a multi year plan, but it does give me time to browse for and experiment with alternatives.
If you’re able, I encourage you to do the same and cite Andy Yen as the driving factor for your decision. We can’t let these tech bro fascists destroy what little semblance of privacy we have left.
I’m glad I bounced when they were caught sponsoring far right creators. Luckily, I had set up my own domain name so the switch was easy. Tuta has been alright thus far.
If Proton is looking for a CEO that’s a) Not an ass b) Has a bunch of degrees and c) Will trust and support experts in the workplace because I don’t know enough about tech to act like a pretentious jerk…
I am looking for work.
A lot of the past criticisms of proton I believe are very overstated but it’s clear that things are not healthy inside proton.
Edit. Considering how big of a target proton is, if this is how unhealthy the culture is, I’m surprised they haven’t had any big incidents already.
I did my part. My sub renewed in Sept hoping this shit for brains issues a sincere apology but given the state of the world I am doubtful. But either way time to find something that doesn’t put all my peas in the same pot.
Unfortunately I can’t send a message by cancelling. Fortunately it’s because I already saw their CEO was a fascist-supporting duck dickwad who only paid lip service to privacy/security in the name of profit (so I went with different companies for my VPN/email/etc needs).
Share what you went with
I have two things to add:
- You all rock. Thank you for all the migration suggestions, and tips.
- Fuck Andy Yen, of course.
I keep seeing folks mention that at least it is a good and secure service why should I leave? this should be why: via: https://www.404media.co/manifestos-fear-and-loser-thinking-inside-protons-ai-reckoning/
Andy Yen, the CEO of Proton, had a message for an employee in the company’s security Slack channel who urged the company to at least take a few days to pentest newly written code before pushing it live. “That’s bullshit and loser thinking. Of course it’s possible to be fast and secure,” Yen wrote in the channel at the end of August. “Stop thinking always of how to be slower, and focus more on how to be faster.”
I think they’re thinking of how to be securer dumbass. Which is probably smart considering everyone and their uncle is using AI to find vulnerabilities everywhere they can these days.
I was on day 21 of my 30 day guarantee on a 2 year subscription. I have cancelled and requested a refund. Thank you for bringing this to my attention.
Nah. I’m going to keep the subscription
I have an invite to thundermail, seriously considering it. Its not as featured as proton mail, but then I dont use most of the proton features in my mail plus subscription. I have 6 months left on my pre paid proton subscription, so its something to think about.
Did Andy Yen do something stupid again? I think I’m out of the loop.
EDIT: Just saw it. Ugh. Why can’t we just have nice things not run by jerks?
This time at least was just tech bro AI crap, not fascism crap. Progress??
Well, the way he seems to treat his workers…
I had already made up my mind when he called trump’s administration something like “the people’s party”. I’ve been a client since forever, renewing every 2 years during sales, but not this time.
And now reading more about what kind of person he is, ultra capitalist boss talking about “loser” mentality… What a cunt. Reminds me of musk
company’s security Slack channel urged Proton to at least take a few days to pentest newly written code before pushing it live. “That’s bullshit and loser thinking. Of course it’s possible to be fast and secure,” Yen wrote in the channel at the end of August. “Stop thinking always of how to be slower, and focus more on how to be faster.” Yen added, “stop lovingly handcrafting all our code and use AI more.”
His values have been incompatible with Proton’s mission for some years now. Proton hasn’t deviated from their mission however so I’m fine using their products until they do.
I incidentally agree with the guy that handwritten code is practically obsolete in this age of llms. Typewriters and hard copy markups are also practically obsolete in the age of word processors yet some of the best and most prolific writers use them exclusively.
Give people options and let them choose what works for them. So many CEOs have a hard time with this concept.
You definitely don’t code if you think hand written code obsolete.
Yeah, LLMs can code something (in particular something that has existed), but ot does it in an extremely inefficient whackadoodle way. Hell it can’t even do a simple web page (not even a whole site) without going insane on the amount of div containers it makes. I remember once it made 5 div containers for what was easily possible to do by just changing width=400px instead of 700px instead.
And that’s just HTML and CSS! With a high end model!
And you think is a good idea to let it touch something that requires security and slimness???
Using it is like fixing a car engine by strappimg on another car engine to the hood of the car and connecting from there. Yeah the car runs now but…
Hi 👋 I am a professional programmer with 35 years of experience and I believe coding by hand has been obsolete for ~6mo, now, maaaaaybe up to a year. You want someone with experience driving the car, but I haven’t hand-written more than maybe 100 lines of code professionally in several months. If anything, I waited too long.
I just finished a long process of degoogling. Don’t tell me I have to deproton now. Ugh.
I was going to use them to de-Google.
Then he did stupid shit and I passed on going proton.
Then I considered:
If I'm going to de-google, just to throw all my shit on another company I have no control over, what in the fuck is the point?Host your own for what you can/want to.
Seperate the things you don’t wish to self host and put them with companies you like for the time being.
If one of them becomes awful, you’re only moving one service.
Self hosting is down the line for me, for sure.
There’s a Hetzner option. The server is super fucking cheap. They just give you a virtual slice of a VM and host up a nextcloud. That gives you storage and office apps. Move mail to tuta. Keepassx and syncthing for passwords. ( i would have said bitwarden, but they’re in halloweentown at the moment too)
Honestly mail on Tuta is disappointing. It works nut it’s very basic.
Rules have one option… send the mail to a folder, of which Trash is one. Can’t forward, can’t add tags or labels, can’t even disable the new mail notification even if you send it to trash.
Want folders to only show up if there are unread messages? Not an option.
Calendar events… want a reminder? You get 6 choices (start, 5m, 10m, 30m, 1hr, 1 day). Want 15m or maybe 2hr? Sorry, too bad… no custom option.
Things work but it’s very basic. I wished I’d researched a bit more before took my domain to it. I’ll switch later.
Is there any truth to the rumors that Tuta is some backdoor intelligence operation or such?
I literally just started the process of Google -> Proton, so I feel you. In terms of personal privacy it’s a step in the right direction…I’m not going to self host or anything too complicated so I think that’s the balance for now. Glad others are able to put some pressure on them to do better though!
“Unfortunately for me, my subscription just renewed last month on a multi year plan, but it does give me time to browse for and experiment with alternatives.”
I walked away from a 2 year proton subscription after using them for only 6 months
Proton are why I would never sign up to a vpn subscription ever again.
