OH COME ON WHERE AM I GONNA GET EMAIL AND VPNS NOW >:[ AHHGG guess imma have to pay…
They also sponsor a far-right influencer in Brazil.
This guy is literally a grandson of a dictator of the military dictatorship. He was also one of the articulators of the 2023 coup attempt, pressing the military to join
very cool proton
edit: giving more context in case someone wants to post this in their subreddit (I won’t): his name is Paulo Figueiredo and he still have a proton vpn sponsor link in every video on youtube.
I’m from Brazil and I hadn’t seen this yet. It’s disgusting! Dude, Proton never again! They are financing the most rotten things in Brazil! Very sad and revolting!
Three things on Proton:
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Proton mail has been in a rampage with sponsor YouTube channels and, in my opinion, that is a mistake. I would have kept it an organic growth, but that is me… a nobody, and Proton has become far more successful than no other email provider in the privacy world.
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Considering even that, Proton is not vetting who is sponsoring. This is a fiasco. For instance they try to sponsor the channel “The hated one” that never takes any sponsors and even constantly criticizes channels that does it. That is a mayor blunder for Proton, there is no scrutiny at all with their marketing deployment. By the way, we learned that that youtubers get a juicy amount by Proton in these sponsorships (I think was $70 per subscription).
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Proton, for years, has been aiming for the masses, not the most serious in privacy (for instance, androidś Proton email still uses Google push services). That is not bad per se, I still recommend Proton to many. But those with a more ideological approach to privacy or those requiring top notch on it, should be aiming for other service providers.
I think this is a very balanced opinion. I do like the services they offer, but they seem to step in it far too often and people are quick to swarm when they do. Here’s hoping that this incident will cause some serious reflection within the company to reevaluate their approach. Maybe going back to the organic growth or self-promoting in key areas.
For push notifications I don’t think you have practical alternatives to FCM and APNs.
’
Considering what the Proton guy has said about MAGA I imagine these are on purpose.
Honeypot behavior, don’t you think? We are suppose to be trusting them, but this is what they do?
controlled opposition
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Ironically I am happier with cock.li than proton
(context: owned by 4chan user (with a grain of salt(?)) but it’s best i’ve found :/ )
All of us could use some cock.li
What does the “li” after the end of your sentence mean?
What is carcinization?
It’s how life tends to evolve into crab-like forms. I’m not good at thinking up usernames, so it was the best I came up with. I like the Rust language, and the language’s mascot is a crab. So, my username is about the tendency of codebases to turn to Rust.
Ah I see. Not well, but I see. Ferric triggered my question because I use Ammonium ferric cyanide and Ammonium ferric citrate. You mix those two things together in warm water to create Mike Ware’s NewCyanotype formula. Then you paint them over paper or other surfaces and expose them to UV light under a photo negative. The result is that a blue print photo is created. Then you wash away that image in water. The blue bits are water insoluble so they stay. The rest is dissolved And floats away.
Liechtenstein
Seems kind of unnecessary at the end there, doesn’t it? Not like the sentence has anything to do with the country.
The corporation sponsors the pro capitalist ideologue? I’m shocked.
Well, I am concerned. I paid $100+ on a proton bundle subscription during the Black Friday sale, it came with half a terabyte cloud storage, a fast and Private vpn, and a proton pass which integrates well with the email provider. It was cheap, and private, and it all works well together.
Proton is owned 60 something percent by the proton non profit organisation, which makes regular donations to other private project’s like GrapheneOS. It’s worked well for me. But this is really concerning considering I oppose fascism, and broadly want to support a leftist, anti-capitalist movement.
This also sucks because the far right want their internet privacy as much as the anti capitalist left. Does this mean proton is an evil company, that even if it has good, private technology, should be boycotted? When frankly, if the left boycotted, and didn’t participate in any capitalist organisation, we would likely starve to death.
Could this just be a marketing issue? Ffs the consumer should not be blamed for the faults of a company, and using their product.
People in this thread love to dunk on proton but they don’t have time to heavily investigate all the sponsorships and affiliate links, they’re too busy actually keeping the service up and secure.
Here’s proton’s response
I was afraid Proton would eventually go down the far right route… and it seems like my fears came true
their CEO publicly announced support for trump; anyone saying otherwise about proton’s proclivities is coping too hard – especially the ones in this community.
you can say this about literally every tech company these days.
Which is why we support Open Source like Firefox, Thunderbird, GIMP, NextCloud, LibreOffice and a whole lot more. :-)
Any good VPNs big dawg?
I don’t need VPN… Sorry mate.
With euro office coming up, there was some musing that libre office has Russian roots, does that change the equation any?
It’s Euro-Office that might have Russians roots. Do get the facts straight. ;-)
LibreOffice is the only real free and open, open source office suite out there.
From what I understood: ONLYOFFICE is a fork of Libre Office by a russian company. NextCloud was using ONLYOFFICE for its built-in cloud office suite replacement. Then they forked it with others to have greater control on the software with no communication whatsever to the company developing ONLYOFFICE without respecting their questionnable trademark restriction within ONLYOFFICE licence which I am still unsure if it was compatible with GPL licence Libre Office is using.
I’d cut nextcloud from that list
As long as it is open source, then there’s not much to worry about. ;-)
Why?
very true; capitalists will always capital.
I have not seen evidence of Proton “going the far right route” yet. They are just sponsoring channels that ever mention privacy and far right ones frequently does that too. You can blame proton for no scrutinize, but not of siding with the right or the left. Proton is just focusing in mayor growth and nothing else, for better or for worse.
Archived BlueSky Post of them: https://archive.ph/2yWGz
I read this. The guy criticising him seemed like a liberal chud, and the CEO, imo, seems like a centrist chud.
In fact, he seems like an anti corporation radical centrist.
Of course this is the dumbest thing for him to say, considering Trumps corruption with Elon Musk, and him having multi billionaire tech CEOs at his inauguration, clearly Trump is not against big tech.
I can’t see much of a problem with this, yeah Trump actually did started something useful for all the wrong reasons and the guy praised that, the company sponsoring far right weirdos is waaaay more problematic to be honest.
Using Proton always seemed like a bad idea. People come to Proton in order to deGoogle or de-big-tech but then lock themselves into their ecosystem, defeating the entire purpose.
Not mention how scummy their PR-Team, their CEO and their Business Practices are.
So many Proton sponsered content creators spread lies about how Proton Mail is supposedly E2E encrypted or how Proton VPN is supposedly a privacy and security tool.
Time and time again they have lied about how much data they have and how much they have disclosed to investigating agencies.The only way I could ever undestand someone using Proton Mail would be to use their service but behind your own domain, such that migrating away stays easy.
I did this myself in 2023, coming from google. And have now dropped their Eco system for all disconnected privacy friendly options like mailbox.org and bitwarden for example.
But I also use my own domain and a ton of alias email addresses so wasn’t locked to my proton email address in any meaningful way
Has there been some revelation that ProtonMail isn’t E2EE?
Or that their VPN isn’t a privacy tool?
Every so often I’ll see these claims made by random people on the internet but there’s never any truth behind them. It’s usually just some non-technical person who doesn’t really understand the first thing about technology.
Thanks for the heads up. Haven’t really used Proton, but I have a few accounts in case of… But now they will be deleted.
Such companies “sponsor” everyone. It’s cheaper than normal advertisements.
You’ve got some companies advertising with streamers/youtubers that do some checks on who they advertise with. They use specialised communication agencies, it’s their job.
Yes, and then you have companies like Proton Mail.
Companies that neither do their job nor get someone to do it for them, and end up financing fascists, even though they should be especially careful given their CEO past declarations ?
Nah. Nintendo have literally removed people from their Ambassador program over things like suicide ideation and talking about getting help for it. Proton absolutely can and probably should vet their ambassador program.
Even Proton themselves admit that this was a misstep.
It still means that my subscription fees are ending up in the pockets of a far right “influencer”. Fuck them for doing me dirty like that.
Really, that’s how they use our subscription money… I’m not renewing.
ceo praised trump then deleted the tweet. it should have been the first warning sign he is a fascist.
It’s actually wilder than that. The official Proton account went onto several platforms to repeat the endorsement.
man, is it just time for me to quit technology altogether?
Is there an article about this?
https://reddit.com/comments/1u052qp there’s this thread on Reddit at least
https://www.reddit.com/r/ProtonMail/comments/1u05xs2/comment/oqgihvq/
Here’s some of protons response
Thanks, yeah seems it was a mistake. The CEO / founder is I believe a libertarian, but at least he believes in something, like privacy.
And for us who refuses to open links to Big Tech like reddit. Is there any other trusted sources for this?
You could check redlib and put the links in it
Actual larper.
Proton did respond to this.
https://www.reddit.com/r/ProtonMail/comments/1u05xs2/comment/oqgihvq/
why is this comment so buried. An official response should be the top comment, and as of writing this only has 2 upvotes
To avoid you all a trip to reddit:
You’re right to raise this, and we want to address it directly and provide you important context on how this happened.
Vincent Lapierre’s channel should never have been part of our affiliate and sponsorship program, because we intentionally avoid association with channels whose content could distract from our message and divide our community.
Proton operates globally, and while our services are available to everyone regardless of political views and our mission is consistent everywhere, our knowledge of every local media landscape is not. In this case, our team didn’t have enough context about the French space to make a well-informed decision, and that’s on us.
We also want to be straight about what a placement like this is and isn’t. An affiliate or sponsorship arrangement is a transactional placement for awareness, not an endorsement of a creator’s views. In the case of Vincent Lapierre, this was a single video sponsorship, not a partnership.
But that distinction doesn’t excuse what happened here. The responsibility to vet who we put our name next to is ours, and we didn’t meet it this time. We’re now reviewing our vetting process and our guidelines for our marketing agencies to ensure this doesn’t happen again.
If you see something like this again, tell us. We rely on your feedback and vigilance.
