Please remember something very important everyone: The company may have changed its policy, but the company that made the policy hasn’t changed. The people that made the bad decisions are still in charge, and the priorities that made them make that decision are still the same. They haven’t changed.
This is relevant not just for Proton, but about every time company pretends to step back from a bad decision.
Absolutely, these people only care about the “image”, they’ll say anything without changing anything
The way they interpret bad press is never, “my idea is bad.” Instead, they think, “my idea was misunderstood.”
So until the people change, they same kinda of policies will continue to be pushed until they stumble upon a way to present it that doesn’t generate loud resistance.
Anyone that unironically uses the word “loser” to try to motivate a policy by mocking the opposite, is not mature or responsible enough to be in a position of power.
Also, mocking instead of giving technical reasons only happens when you are not right but want to win the argument anyway.
So yeah, he just outed himself as not fit for any manager position, worst of all a CEO.
People saying they will go back if he steps down, I think this kind of is a wake up call on the company using privacy not seriously but as a marketing gimmick.
I would stay away from them. Surprise surprise, another YouTube advertised product that is shit…
What even is the alternative, I don’t see any other privacy focused company that is directly trying to tackle the g suite with an email+storage+office combo.
Sure we have mailbox.org, cryptpad, and other specific privacy cloud providers, but none of them have them all in combination.
There’s an argument to not have an all-in-one provider though: it increases vendor lock-in. If a company turns into a direction you don’t like, you’d have to find a suitable alternative to replace all of your services, and that takes a lot of time and effort. If you spread it between multiple companies however, you’ll only need to switch a few, maybe even have less work if you use a domain (for example for custom aliases).
Plus, something about Proton I disliked is that their products are missing key features you just expect from your products. For example, every mail provider offers you the option to add todo-lists or even journals, because WebDAV just has it, however Proton still lacks that to my knowledge. Other password safe programs have a folder system to better organise your entries. Proton Pass does not. I’d rather use many companies that each does one thing well than one that does everything rather mediocre.
IDK, I configured my own email with a cheap VPS when google made me mad so I didn’t depend on anyone, but yeah that is not for everyone.
I’ve been slow to transition away from Google products but I gotta say… to make an effort to ditch Google and then have THIS happen to you? I feel bad for those people. I really do… You do the right thing and get slapped in the face. Not fair.
Anyone trying to ditch Google for principled reasons, not just annoyance or fashion, skipped proton. Since their inception they stink of corporate BS. It was apparent from the beginning that the privacy push was just a coat of paint. They still belong to the oppressor class and will defend their own, despite of what the marketing says. Always look at actions, not pretty marketing and fancy manifestos.
I’m glad I listened to the People arround here, who said to not lay all of your eggs in a single basket. Thats the reason why I skipped proton and use VPN and Mail from different companies now.
Andy Yen is so desperate to become a tech bro oligarch like all of his role models. You lead a non-profit, dickhead, act like it.
So what does that mean going forward? Going forward, I’m still going to push,” he added.
So going forward, I mean to be going forward.
If there was any job LLM AI were best suited to replace, it’s these tech CEOs
Oh god yes, I can’t tell you how many times i’ve seen execs in general come in and confidently peddle their motivational crap and ethos only to be proven wrong 2 weeks later and having to backtrack and reframe their messaging with absolutely no consequences. But they only do that from peer pressure not because they actually believe they’re wrong, often exactly as the proton ceo did, saying they still want to push forward just in a different way. These people are unembarrassable and you can only get away from them if you quit or wait for them to quit and be fired, there’s no reforming.
For years I’ve been convinced that most CEOs can be replaced by a “magic 8 ball” or a dice and it will be all the same or better.
So yeah, doing it with a slightly less random thing could be fine.
He said it himself: it’s important to win on appearances before technical stuff, or something like that. He’s definitely going to push that again; or keep doing it even now, but in a more discreet manner.
Is this the same Guy that has already said some Trump aligned stuff? I forget the specifics.
I’ve been using a combination of Google and Microsoft office products since forever, I’d love to switch, but I really don’t understand where the hell I’m supposed to go. I can’t really self-host (I only have a phone and laptop that I use as mobile devices) and I’d really like to not have to actively think about how my email works when I’m using it. I was sort of hoping Proton would be it, but they just keep sucking harder and harder, they don’t seem like a viable alternative anymore.
Does anyone here have some advice?
The only other secure location I have heard is Tuta Mail but I have seen reports that they also use AI with their source code but the difference between Tuta Mail and Proton is that Tuta Mail hasn’t pushed their devs so hard or called them losers for worrying about security issues. I think the biggest complaint right now about Proton is the fact that their CEO doesn’t respect his people and is chasing money instead of taking care of the non-profit and their securty minded customers. If you’re just looking for an email that just doesn’t scan your stuff with AI and things like that, Port87.com might suit your needs.
Go Home (selfhost) never Go Big.
If you’re looking to switch to a new provider, may I recommend my own service, Port87. We don’t use AI at all:
https://port87.com/2026/10/we-dont-use-ai/
It’s also a good idea to use a custom domain for your email, because there is always a risk that a provider you like today, you won’t like tomorrow. Custom domains make it much easier to switch to a new provider.
Thanks for the link. It looks interesting!
ready to move my entire family once again to secria. hopefully it won’t implode right away after the switch
I mean the best way to make them understand is to comply with their vision to the point where you make them eat their words. If i was a proton employee i would vibe code the shit out of everything until they’ve got a security breach every day. The only reason these kinds of execs only listen to one thing: profits. Just saying
The problem with that plan is that there very rarely is any accountability for the executives. At worst, they get a lucrative package, and find a new position in another company, with more “experience”. It’s usually the workers who get blamed and fired, even if they were following orders.
Well maybe that experience will teach them something. And as to the workers? Sounds like they were gonna get fired anyway. Damned if you do damned if you don’t
It will be impossible to trust this company again until Yen and the rest of the C-suite resign.
I’m slowly trying to degoogle. Mail is a big concern for me. I have a google business account to handle a few domains. I used a small shared host before and it was crap. Every couple months they’d make some change and all my shit broke. I switched to Google because I knew it would be reliable and largely set and forget. It’s been that. I hate Google though. So if not proton, then who?
I think Tuta and mailbox.org are generally recommended, but I use Posteo which has been fine
Tuta is not everyones fave right now, look at my history for details…I havent followed up on everything yet but I thought the same as you.
https://lemmy.ml/post/53619601/28192074
This seems like a pretty good breakdown.
I’m testing out tuta and infomaniak. Since I don’t care all that much about encryption, infomaniak is looking good, in my opinion.
I don’t have any fancy use-cases but Posteo has been good for me too.
+1 for posteo
I can recommend mailbox.org
And you can get random junk emails that expire. Great for signing up to rando websites
I mean that should be a must have for private email services
Just looked into posteo. Great pricing (1 euro/month?) and they’ve got encryption. And organic vegetarian lunches!
Tuta uses walled garden closed source apps. Posteo does not support custom domains unless you do something like addy.io. Mailbox.org does encryption at rest but your client needs to support pgp to use it. They all have their drawbacks.
Personally I’ve started to move from proton to mailbox.org with addy.io for custom domains and aliases. Once it’s solid I’m moving addy.io to self hosted
Posteo does not support custom Domains, because it’s unsafe and inherently complicated to use with all the security settings of a modern email system turned on
The important part is to not put all of your eggs in one basket. This makes it so you can migrate off of one at a time rather than your entire life at once.
Ye, I’m finding that with Google. You don’t realize how tightly locked in you are until you try to leave.
A counterpoint though, is that putting 12 eggs into different baskets means having to manage 12 baskets. It’s a trade off
It is a trade off, but it’s well worth it, since most of it requires no actual maintenance (after you migrate of course) unless you have to leave for some reason.
Try Fastmail, you will be impressed
After using Tuta for a year and not really enjoying the experience I surveyed the landscape and picked Fastmail. I adore it.
It being in a five eyes country will certainly earn it some strikes against it among the privacy crowd, however.
Email is inherently unsafe. Privacy advocates know this. But we all still need it for managing accounts and such.
Any provider just reliably “doing email” and not actively harming its users in some way is going to look pretty good to most of us.
Email is something we simply cannot live without. They are primary sources of communication to reach you like account notifications, what accounts you’ve registered with it and vice versa.
It is unfortunate, but that is indeed the case.
Which is why I said:
But we all still need it for managing accounts and such.
I moved over to Tuta personally for email. And Tuta is EU-based if that matters to you. If you use other Proton features there are alternatives there as well.
For Proton Pass and Authenticator, there’s Bitwarden (and self-hosted Vaultwarden). Which supports password storage, 2FA codes, and Passkeys across basically all devices. Also supports SSH agent forwarding if you work with that a lot.
For Proton Drive, Koofr seems to be a good option for cloud storage, also EU-hosted. They also have an additional locally-encrypted Vault for files you want additional security on. Things like 2FA bypass codes you get when you set up your accounts but don’t want want hanging around in the open at all.
Mailo.com. It’s ugly as 2005 websites but it just works. You get IMAP, family accounts. It’s just email. Old and reliable french company.
it may not be “beautiful” by what passes as “modern design” but i think it’s great, just the way it is. it’s the modern full page “responsive” scroll til you die shit designed for small screens that suck ass.
First time I’ve seen Mailo recommended, thanks for sharing. Does it support custom domains? And have you had any issues making accounts using a Mailo address?
No issues. I only use custom domains for years to be independent and they support it. Also they have nice ways for kids accounts with moderation of what’s getting into your kid inbox.
Except of shit web design that i don’t use, all works just fine. IMAP, caldav and so on. I’m super happy.
Cool, thanks for the follow-up. I think I’ll give them a go based on your experience, appreciate it! :)
Here’s Lemmy’s reply from yesterday triggered by the same concern:
https://lemmy.world/post/53735981
Gmail was actually the easiest one to separate from, if you just count the transferring email addresses. It is a pain in the ass because so many services fight like hell to hold onto your google account you sometimes have to jump through hoops to remove it–a security risk in itself.
The big sticking point for me so far is photos… there are other options, but itś all integrated into my phone in weird ways I don’t want to bother with right now.
GMail is not that easy. Because, there are places and services that use e-mail clients that are easy to be sent to and received by GMail. I’ve experienced this with ProtonMail for a while, where there’ll be services and individuals that could not reach me through my Proton e-mail and I’ve had difficulty reaching out to them.
I did a pretty deep dive for my company recently. We are very data-privacy centric. Here was my Lemmy post on it: https://lemmy.world/post/51963153
Some of the items there are mentioned here, but after the evaluation, my hunch was correct and we are likely switching to https://runbox.com/
Good service, pricing, privacy focused but not so much that you need to host your own proxy like with Proton, and runs sustainably.
mailfence is pretty good so far. very basic but there are nice clients for IMAP these days
i can’t get mail from some places to mailfence. sending is fine. no errors with the connection. no bounces. senders have looked at their logs, they’re fine. mail is sent. it is received. mailfence just loses it somewhere before it makes it to my inbox and they won’t help with anything at all. so i gave up with them.
I’ve been pretty happy with Purelymail.
same. i started migrating to proton. and have my own domains. but use them through prot. now with this horsecrap i gotta get a third thing going… and migrate there. :/
iCloud does the trick and would work on google devices
if you’re already invested in apple devices, icloud for email is definitely worth the look. it’s often overlooked for that; hell, a lot of apple users don’t even realize it can do email.
Depending what you need and want, I can highly recommend posteo.de and while they are not as polished and use standard DAV, it works absolutely flawless, they are relatively cheap, based in German and have certifications for all kinds of security.
If you want something like Google Workplace, get a Nextcloud. Still not as polished, but open and if you want to change the provider, you can just do so. I recommend a combination of Nextcloud and Posteo.
And if you need a custom domain with everything bundled together, I can recommend xaweho.de. though they are not cheap…
I like Migadu. You must bring your own domain and you can add as many separate accounts as you want
I’ll continue to use ProtonMail myself. But, I can’t in good conscience feel in reason to support this company with my money and I’m especially concerned with relying on ProtonVPN so that will be getting uninstalled.
This is just not how you win people over and I’m tired of this day and age in tech where companies like this, pad their PR up with promises then do a 180 on their attitude towards everyone who uses their products that makes everyone second guess them. It’s bad enough we have things like Discord who has spent a couple years, making themselves look good and cozy for the public market that have alienated its userbase.
Bluesky showing their true colors and then we have this asshole CEO on Proton taking a dump whenever he pleases on the values of why we bothered using Proton in the first place.
iVPN is a good alternative. What concerns me is his disregard for proper security review of AI generated code, because that is one of the stupidest things a company focused on security and privacy can do. Even if one has no issue with his previous remarks about Trump, this new one is legitimately a security issue that affects the product itself.
You are right. He will try again one day in some shape or form. But it‘s still nice to see a backlash with cancellations can make a difference. Teaches us that we should keep trying to change things for the better or stop changes that make things worse for us.
Is that especially likely? he’s one of the founders afaik, I think they all are
He has to go and the Proton workers have to form a union.
Every worker at every tech company needs to unionize.
Every worker at every company needs to unionise.
Every worker needs to unionize.
Every union needs to unionize.
Every union needs a state (protecting its interests and preferably under control of these worker associations)
So, a union?
deleted by creator
Every worker at every
techcompany needs to unionize.FTFY
Or we just need to drop Proton. Why is the first reaction to reform a company?
If anything, the workers should band together to form a new, more flat organization (esp., coop)
Edit: just want to add, that “made in Switzerland” does not make a company a fair or good company.
In one exchange, an employee in the 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.”
Yikes, this Yen guy seems really charming
Remember, this is the same guy who, last year, posted an explicitly pro-Republican Tweet on the official Proton account, and then backtracked and tried to say they were apolitical. In his excuses, he used the extremely right-wing coded phrase “triggered” in a way that perfectly matched the way right-wingers use the term, and when called out for that he claimed he was “unaware that triggered is offensive” because “I don’t live in the US so I really don’t have ready a list of words people are not allowed to use”. Some very right-winger-complains-about-cancel-culture–coded language right there, and an excuse that falls apart the moment you realise that it would require being in tune with right-wing language enough to have used “triggered” accurately in the first place, that his complaints simply don’t work.
His words are aggressively out of touch, but I will say that I agree somewhat. I tried going back to handcrafting code for a bit and it really does feel slow. Like, “absolutely no way to compete in the current market” slow.
Slow has nothing to do with pen testing or not. Pen testing is how you validate that the code is secure, AI or no. This is showing a shocking lack of care about security for a company pretending to offer a secure product.
Best of all, that really is something LLMs are quite good at too. Aikido has a feature where you whitebox pentest your entire application.
Without the entire slack exchange, it’s not clear whether Andy Yen was responding exclusively to the call for pentesting, or towards broader comments about AI code.
Look I’ll be honest, a CEO telling his workers their (valid) opinions are bullshit and looser thinking is absolutely unacceptable, even putting the context of security (or lack thereof) aside. If you refuse to listen to your engineers as a leadership, you have failed miserably.
“bullshit and loser thinking” would be inappropriate wording even if the opinions were actually objectively wrong.
I also found the comments pretty inflammatory, which makes me wonder what the engineers had said to get the conversation to that point. I don’t like to make judgement without the full context
No matter the context, someone who can be baited into putting something this obviously unprofessional in writing is not a good leader.
Fair enough, I do agree it’s very unprofessional
Speed is not a good quantifier for industry success. Speed to market might get you some initial customers, but speed alone won’t keep them. If your product is junky, slow, and insecure you are going to lose those customers you had, and potentially open yourself up to lawsuits in the process.
The things that matter more to long term success and sustainability are all the things AI is not.
I never said speed was all that mattered. But from my experience, and my other friends in the industry, it is possible to achieve speed while maintaining quality. security, and maintainability. Because these are all things that the AI can look for too. Just look at how many vulnerabilities AI is finding nowadays. Just like any other product manager, you can bring up concerns, ask the AI to look into them, and validate the AI’s claims. Just like you would manage a team of engineers. Which is of course still faster than writing everything yourself.
If all you ask the AI to do is produce lines of code, that’s all it will do. But AI workflows can be far more complex than that.
The quote is talking about how the CEO is scoffing at an engineer asking for a few days for pentesting. None of that has to do with using or not using AI for coding. Doesn’t matter who wrote the code, the management of a privacy first company looking to cut corners on testing for buggy code is a no no for their customers.
Without the whole slack context, the pentesting comment might have been part of a whole chain of comments trying to discredit AI, and the CEO is trying to push for AI. I wouldn’t jump to saying the CEO is against pentesting in general until I had more information
What part of insulting people that wants to take it slow makes sense as a response to a chain of comments discrediting AI? You’re twisting your whole body trying to invent hypotheticals that doesn’t even make sense.
Why are you making yourself look foolish to defend a company you have no financial or personal connection to? Unless you actually do.
Recall that I already mentioned that his comments seemed aggressively out of touch. Insulting your engineers is a bad look.
However, I’m saying that he isn’t necessarily against pentesting, which is what some comments seem to be thinking. I would want to read the whole context to see if that’s what he really believes.
Proton Mail is already junky and slow yet I bought into the mission. I admit that I was fooled. Subscribed earlier this year until 2028, though, so I’ll be on this sinking ship for a while.
It only feels slow when everyone is forced to use AI, none of these companies have proven to operate at a profit yet
Huh? The frontier model companies aren’t operating at a profit but all the major enterprise tech companies (Google, Microsoft, Salesforce, Amazon, etc) are using huge amounts of AI in the SDLC and beyond and certainly are operating at a profit…
They’re operating at a profit because of their large legacy products, not because of their new stuff.
Example A: Google
Did you even see their earnings miss and what they attributed it to?
I’m not sure what you are trying to say, what difference does it make if the users of a product are profitable when the creator of said product isn’t, the users of AI make their money on a diversified portfolio of products, the AI companies are making no profits right now as the subscription prices they are charging are at a loss to gain market share, if they don’t find a sustainable profit margin over time they will have to shut down or increase the cost of the subscription so only a limited number of companies and individuals will be able to afford it. Either way the gushing AI inference taps will stop leaking so freely at some point.
Every single one of those companies reported negative free cash flow this quarter, and some have been running in the negative for a lot longer. The only tech company at that scale NOT losing money hand over fist is Apple, and they’re the only one not investing heavily in AI… but I’m sure that’s just a coincidence.
Microsoft and Salesforce both have very positive free cash flow… but in any case that isn’t profit. All 4 of the companies I listed are still very profitable (Alphabet/google being the one “exception” where they are still wildly profitable but down from q3 2024 vs q3 2026). But even in the Alphabet and Amazon cases, they have negative free cash flow because they are investing like crazy in AI. This doesnt mean they aren’t profitable it means they are using their historic performance to make a big bet on the future. This is fundamentally very different from the frontier lab companies who have never been profitable and are staying afloat mostly from cash injection from big tech (Anthropic is an interesting one that may have just turned the corner).
It’s fine to have moral, labor, or environmental objections to “AI” (which is a very stupid name for some specific applications of machine learning) but I would expect Lemmy to have a higher level of discourse around this stuff that is actually rooted in reality.
My job is not to be fast. This expectation of development speed is bosses not understanding why they hire specialists.
I code, make sure it works, is secure and maintainable. That’s how I own my work.
as mentioned in another comment, it’s possible to make it secure and maintainable if you manage AI properly. Managing AI is like a product manager managing a team. It’s up to you to push for security and maintainability, but AI can absolutely look for vulnerabilities and holes and code smells if you ask for it.
Yet somehow speed seems all that matters to c-suits.
Coming back to my point: slower ≠ worse.
Can AI speed things up? Oh, yes. Is it really better? It depends, but I’m leaning to no.I don’t think Andy Yen was saying that slower = worse, or that faster is all that matters. My read of the conversation is that engineers were pushing against AI saying that it makes code less secure and maintainable, and Andy was pushing back saying that’s not necessarily the case, that it’s possible to use AI to speed things up while maintaining quality.
In one exchange, an employee in the 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.”
There was a Lemmy post about a Proton employee providing more context for Andy’s statements: https://no.lastname.nz/post/4106893
sounds like a “you” problem
“skill issue” comments are rarely productive. I have many friends that also work in the industry that feel the same, even if they are against AI. I trust their opinions (and my own of course) over yours.
cool. trust your -20 down voted comment
EDIT - and wait, let’s clarify. I NEVER SAID “skill issue”. my implication wasn’t necessarily “it’s because you’re slow”, it was “good things take time”. have some patience.
LLMs erode normal human patience and skills. your skills will thank you for the time you invest.
EDIT 2 - I also work in the industry. you’ve probably used something I helped build. I’m telling you, with the experience to back it up, that you’re only hurting yourself and helping the ruling class.
You might be able to ship a codebase quicker but once it hits a certain level of complexity, you’ll have a codebase that no single human being on your team really understands. You’ll now be forever tied to an ever increasing AI subscription cost
which may still be worth it to secure a strong position in the market. You have to look at what competition Proton is facing (Google Workspace)
Hey, the next quarter’s profits is all that matters, eh?
In a capitalist society, yes pretty much. Andy Yen doesn’t have much control over that. As far as I see it, he’s just trying to provide a viable private alternative to Google workspace.
But this is exactly why this is so fucking stupid. Most people didn’t switch to proton because their suite is better than google performance or feature wise. The google apps work just fine. You switch exactly because google is an unethical shit company, that harvests your data on top… If proton adopts the same values why the fuck would I stay with them…
Proton is focused on privacy, anti-AI was not in their initial mission statement.
stop lovingly handcrafting all our code
I guess they’re headquartered in Switzerland, but have American values. It’s a shame, because having privacy engineered like a Swiss watch makes a lot of sense.
Near the start of the meeting, Yen said, “I want to acknowledge myself, personally, that there was a communication failure on my part and there are many things that probably could and should have been communicated differently, and this is something that I’ll have to reflect on and improve over time. So I will do that.”
“So what does that mean going forward? Going forward, I’m still going to push,” he added.
Uh. This news makes everything about 0% better.
“Claude, write an apology for me that blames miscommunication but still acknowledges that I will not meaningfully change my behavior at the heart of the issue.”
Brain dead CEO?! Tune in next week for more obvious news! 💀
Something about upper management just pushes people into being dicks. Maybe cause all they do is work? Even my grand-manager is quite blunt and out of touch. Guess that happens when all you do is micromanage others all day
The further up the ladder you go the more importance is placed on numbers and metrics. Every meeting and every mandatory training is either about leadership decisions or some kind of numbers, be it profit, efficiency, budget or accidents. As a team lead you can still see the individuals you work with, but past that with 100+ people under you, even their health and safety gets reduced to numbers on a sheet.
It gets so ingrained in your brain that its nearly impossible to forget once you reach a point high enough where the shackles loosen a bit.
That doesn’t really excuse anyone from being an out of touch asshole though. You can still see people as people instead of numbers, it just takes more effort to do so.
I think its the opposite in that only dicks go into upper management
of course, he will push. reflection and improve over time is part of his idea of slow-mode.
