Why? Businesses run on revenue. Not goodwill. The free plan they provide is subsidized by paying customers. Of course they are going to market to get customers.
It’s good to always doubt the corps you trust with your privacy and as Proton grows larger, they are no exception to that. I too like many, highly recommend Proton to friends and family because regardless of few missteps here and there and their aggressive marketing push within apps, they still seem like one of the better solutions. Being all-in-one is also good as a powerful alternative to Google/MS etc. that’s not out of US.
I was also bit miffed by the LLM push but it’s inevitable and if Proton doesn’t give up on their core privacy tenets building it out, I’d be happy to use it also one day. I’m keeping an eye on things but it doesn’t disrupt my usage in any means at the moment.
Also to note, Switzerland is no longer a country to trust w.r.t laws around digital privacy. Proton themselves called it out in the Lumo announcement post:
Lumo represents one of many investments Proton will be making before the end of the decade to ensure that Europe stays strong, independent, and technologically sovereign. Because of legal uncertainty around Swiss government proposals(new window) to introduce mass surveillance — proposals that have been outlawed in the EU — Proton is moving most of its physical infrastructure out of Switzerland. Lumo will be the first product to move.
This shift represents an investment of over €100 million into the EU proper. While we do not give up the fight for privacy in Switzerland (and will continue to fight proposals that we believe will be extremely damaging to the Swiss economy), Proton is also embracing Europe and helping to develop a sovereign EuroStack(new window) for the future of our home continent. Lumo is European, and proudly so, and here to serve everybody who cares about privacy and security worldwide.
This is also encouraging to hear since it indicates they do care. But as usual, trust but verify.
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That’s Business 101 and not an issue. Advertising is necessary to expand the customer base. The issue is the poor track record of most of the YT sponsors, e.g RayCon, Raid: Shadow Legends, GFuel, Nord VPN, etc.
Privacy centric services have to stand high on trust. Sponsors of YT videos have historically had low trust. That does raise some doubt.
They also need to make money though. I too hate ads as much as the other person and instinctively block them, but I’d rather see them gain usage while holding onto the core tenets than see them sell out to the next highest bidder.
been using proton for a long time, loved the privacy, but well if it’s an llm it can get dirty with history of organisations and their data handling😑
Any reason to use Proton over Mullvad for a VPN?
That’s definitely problematic, but it’s not a proton specific issue, wordpress default emails (without any custom SMTP) are sent through shared web servers, and these are notorious for getting flagged as spam and get filtered by a lot of email providers. Proton being “privacy and security focused” probably has a more aggressive filter for these things which would adversely affect this. This however doesn’t seem like a privacy issue.
This I’ll have to check out because I’m not sure what you mean exactly by unwelcome scripts. As far as I remember, they just provide you an application/binary for the bridge which sets up a local IMAP and SMTP server which your email client application would connect to. I would imagine some scripts are necessary for this to happen, and the bridge then has to receive any encrypted emails from proton servers, decrypt it locally, then deliver it to your email client. So yes all this would have to happen in the background, because conventional email clients aren’t built for end to end encryption. If it’s doing something other than this then that would be worrisome.
Surfshark is mostly okay, it’s very cheap and I think that’s its biggest strength, it hasn’t had any major breaches either I believe.
Nord however I absolutely cannot agree with, with how they handled the data center breach a few years ago, it’s better to not even consider them anymore. They didn’t even report the breach that happened in March 2018 until October 2019. The third party data center didn’t report the breach to Nord for a few months and then Nord hid it from the public for even longer.
Curiously all of my friends who are in the software field tend to always recommend either mullvad or proton (both of which are quite a bit more expensive than the more popular offerings). I think part of it is the very aggressive advertising of other VPNs on YouTube and other places as @stupid_duck mentioned, and a lot of these products do end up having major flaws, which has definitely led to a bias against products which are mass advertised on YouTube even for me.