Leaving Proton Mail | Hacker News Reader

Leaving Proton Mail

runarcn.no

32 pointsspeckx34 comments

This article is clearly written by someone who doesn't understand how encryption works.

> What happens if I log out of all my proton accounts, travel to the other side of the globe, walk into the first library or internet café I find, and log on to mail.proton.me with my username and password?

The keys are encrypted to your password, that's how you can access your data maintaining E2EE.

That's exactly what I was telling myself, this guy doesn ot understand a word about encryption

Don't be fooled by the technical-sounding article that leads with software/licensing/product-related rationale but buries the real reason:

> After one too many PR scandals though, there was one that I just can't stomach as well as the rest. Which is... The CEO being a Trump man.

These are starting to pop up on HN (another example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49585161). Outright political posts get flagged here so the new tactic looks to be pretending to make a decision for technical reasons.

I was disappointed to learn that the article from 404 media about a "Proposed Nuclear AI Data Center" in Ypsilanti, Michigan wasn't actually a data center with an on-site nuclear power generator, just one that Los Alamos is partially funding and will use. Anyway I think the concerns of everyone opposed to data center construction in Ypsilanti mentioned in that article are stupid, I consider 404 media to be poltically hostile to my interests for writing about it with that editorial stance; and certainly linking to it doesn't make me more inclined to view Protonmail unfavorably.

Is this satire, it's hard to tell these days on the Interweb? Or are you simply thick as a brick? Very confusing.

Can you elaborate on why you think the OP is incorrect? The hit piece on the Ypstilanti data center is quite an embarrassment for any honest news reporter.

Because it's not that cut and dry. There are complicated politics involved and it's obvious the comment is putting their own spin on it.

There's complex politics around hyperscaler data centers, and I'm sympathetic to the complaints against (though in full disclosure I am biased towards building anything, having seen my country held back for years by people opposed to building anything). But the UMich supercomputing center isn't a hyperscaler data center, and it's the height of disingenuous, cynical and dishonest politics to claim that it is. It's an academic research supercomputer. And FYI the protestors have been harassing UMich professors and their families, so sorry. I'm not going to be polite and give them any benefit of doubt. I know the people they're harassing personally and professionally and they're wonderfully kind and intelligent.

If the supercomputing project dies because of this, yellow journalists like 404 media have scientific blood on their hands.

> But the UMich supercomputing center isn't a hyperscaler data center, and it's the height of disingenuous, cynical and dishonest politics to claim that it is.

It may not be a hyperscaler data center (I actually don't see that as the argument anyway) but it is a data center and that's part of the issue in today's landscape, irrespective of if you pick a particular side.

> It's an academic research supercomputer. And FYI the protestors have been harassing UMich professors and their families, so sorry.

Oh, I get it. I worked for a defense contractor for a number of years and every Thursday we had a small group of protestors that would harass us if we walked across the street for lunch. I engaged a few times to ask them if any of them had ever taken a commercial flight as the building they were protesting in front of built most all of the ATC systems the US operated at the time.

But, I'm still going to argue: it's not that simple. While I'm in support of the US continuing R&D through use of new HPC facilities the use cases are not cut and dry. Nuclear weapons are a zero sum game and while I think many would fully support continuued research into improving nuclear weapons systems and scenarios I don't think it's all that productive to continue to invest heavily in expanded nuclear weapons development. Especially having now seen too many administrations being handled by old men who don't have much to lose if they destroy the world.

But, to state "yellow journalists like 404 media have scientific blood on their hands" sounds fucking deranged to me.

There was a brief moment when the Proton CEO published a whole self agrandizing article with pics of himself and the wifey and what selfless people they are, and how she had her own identity and everything, that and all about the servers sitting inside the swiss alps underground, but hey it was free, still is a free add for email services with an almost completely non functional email service behind the adds. I still use it for certain technical things, but it's broken for everday use in the free version The whole thing has the hink, hink with grue, almost like it's google with a different skin. I now have my own web space and email, which is half broken right now, but that suits me as whatever does get through is more work and other time consuming stuff than I can handle

What specifically is broken?

Here’s some shocking facts: emails aren’t anonymous as a protocol, neither private too, stop trying to find an email like that. VPN as the commercial service isn’t anonymous either, there’s always a “trust us” factor, and in this ever changing world, your policy should be always zero trust. Neither proton, nor mullvad, nor signal, none of these popular platforms provide the anonymity and even the privacy you are expecting. If the protocol itself wasn’t designed with anonymity, privacy, and security in mind, everything follows is just marketing and maybe worse, a honeypot.

Re: protocols with trust-minimization in mind, you may be interested in Multi-Party Relays (vs. traditional VPNs which are Single-Party Relays): https://www.privacyguides.org/articles/2024/11/17/where-are-...

With Multi-Party Relays you no longer have a trust a single entity not being malicious or compromised.

Disclaimer: I run obscura.com, which does exactly this with Mullvad (our partner) as the Exit Hop.

There was me, scanning away trying to find actual technical reasons and then...

Bang. It's political.

Opinion discarded.

An additional factor for me leaving was the board member (Rosemary Leith) who was part of the WEF. It seems to me that Proton has been co-opted

Maybe Proton’s copy needs some work, but another page on their website very clearly explains that emails aren’t encrypted when an email leave the ecosystem. Because, as the author points out, they can’t be.

Also, I hate Trump too, but a broken clock is right twice a day. It’s possible to agree with some of the things he says while not being a “Trump man”. Why should we be surprised that the company founded on anti big-tech principles would have a founder who is against big-tech?

I think too that the only way to escape AI-written code in software products is to have written every line yourself. Which is obviously impossible because you’re not going to bootstrap the operating system.

Disagreeing politically is a perfectly valid reason to avoid a product, though the author will have a very hard time finding alternatives with CEOs that aren’t right-leaning. Not a lot of CEOs are on the side of labor.

Sometimes you really have to pick the best available option after weighing all the factors.

Sure, the CEO of Toyota wore a Trump hat to gain favor. That’s a heck of a lot different than the laundry list of distasteful things Elon Musk has done as a CEO of a Tesla like running an illegal government agency and trying to buy votes. I’d pick Toyota over Tesla just like I’d pick Proton over Google or Microsoft, and that’s not only a political choice but a product quality choice as well.

Oh, I totally agree that it’s a valid reason. I just don’t find the authors gripe very meaningful. I say that as somebody who switched to Proton for political reasons too haha.

As soon as Proton gains a Linux client for Drive I might be moving over. Bonus points if they get a photos app that’s more like Ente.

Right now I’m stuck with Filen as the “least bad option.”

Disappointing. I'll need to find an alternative. I was hellbent on leaving google so I didn't care where I went.

Moved from Proton to Fastmail a couple of years ago and couldn’t be happier.

I also made this switch a year ago, in part because I'm Australian and so is Fastmail. I miss some of the Proton bells and whistles, and my visionary plan had some great inclusions, but Fastmail is great. I just use the web app on my graphene phone and it works fine

>because I'm Australian and so is Fastmail.

That seems like the worst reason to use a product. If I had the funds for a non free mail host, I would choose one thats not going to be easy to target with a TCN or TAN.

Mail just isn’t something that’s built in a way that it can be a private service. I think most people should choose a provider based on price and features.

Yes, it’s nice that if everyone you know uses proton then you can send end to end encrypted emails with zero friction. But I consider that more of a side feature rather than a reason to buy it.

Purely Mail is a nice provider in that regard. $10 a year!

I do like FastMail a lot, though.

Proton mostly makes sense if you’re going to use the entire suite, which helps spread the cost and make it a good value.

>Mail just isn’t something that’s built in a way that it can be a private service.

No but theres a lot of daylight between "There might be intermediaries" and "The australian government can verbally request secret adjustments to this companies software"

I fail to see how that matters to the end consumer specifically in the context of an email product. It’s still ultimately a service dealing with plain text data that’s moving between providers in ways you can’t control very well to begin with.

100% of your email is read by someone else. You don’t send private information over email or store it in an email server.

Sure, I wouldn’t personally be buying an end to end encrypted drive service from an Australian company.

I mean, the government could demand an authentication backdoor that's located by non government entities.

Or any of a million things.

The Australian government needs to be treated as an absolute supply chain risk.

Again, a backdoor to data you’re already sending and receiving to basically random strangers on random servers who have an instant ability to forward that information along to anyone.

Maybe so, but I just assume anything I write is being read by multiple different parties anyway. I use Signal too, but I don't trust that either. Face-to-face communication (inside my portable lead chamber) is the way to go

Tuta?

https://tuta.com

Slop article for justifying sloppy political stances.

There are two themes in this article that end up both being flawed:

- Proton’s not an honest/forthright company in terms of open source and for-profit status

- Proton is flawed technically and isn’t really encrypting your data.

Starting with the former, I think the author is letting perfect get in the way of good. Proton has a whole lot of open source going on with their products and that is a whole lot more than anyone else in the space considering the breadth of their products. I don’t blame the author for misunderstanding some complicated technical concepts, but they are sound concepts.

Yes, a service like this needs to make money to be viable long-term. Having a non-profit parent company is way better than being a public company with public shareholder pressure or being owned by Bain Capital.

As far as the second theme here, the author is just plain mistaken on Proton’s encryption. The author is just misunderstanding the technical aspects of the services and goes further than that by accusing Proton of AI marketing copy, which I am personally not seeing. It looks like normal, sensible, and pretty easy to understand writing to me. I can understand if these concepts are difficult to grasp for the general public but I’m not seeing any problems, and there’s also a lot of third party auditing transparency as well.

It might be nice if Proton offered a more user-friendly alternative to PGP encryption for non-technical non-Proton email recipients, like using some kind of secure temporary link inside an unencrypted email, but also, Proton doesn’t have to be the one to provide that service. The author is asking Proton to do the impossible and fix the flaws of email. And you still have a really nice benefit that every Proton user you email has e2e encryption baked in. There’s really no other service with as significant user base offering that.

The author goes on to accuse Proton of spreading themselves too thin despite having a really strong product portfolio. There’s really nothing that their apps are missing besides strong photo organization in Proton Drive similar to something like Ente, Google Photos, iCloud Photos, Immich, etc. They’re pretty much a one-stop shop for everything you could want and are a drop-in replacement for big tech cloud suites with a very respectably better privacy footprint.

Finally, I’ll address the political bit even though I shouldn’t: I’ll just say that a company’s CEO having opposite political beliefs of you is a very legitimate reason to not patronize that company. If the author feels like they can’t be a Proton customer because of public statements made by the CEO, good on them. That’s why CEOs pragmatically shouldn’t talk in a partisan way so they don’t alienate customers. With that said, good luck finding a company with a CEO who isn’t right-leaning. Sometimes a perfect choice isn’t available on the market and you just have to go with the best available one.

Honestly, the older the email service, the better. Drop Proton Mail.

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