this post was submitted on 17 Jun 2024
573 points (100.0% liked)
Privacy
789 readers
48 users here now
A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.
Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.
In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.
Some Rules
- Posting a link to a website containing tracking isn't great, if contents of the website are behind a paywall maybe copy them into the post
- Don't promote proprietary software
- Try to keep things on topic
- If you have a question, please try searching for previous discussions, maybe it has already been answered
- Reposts are fine, but should have at least a couple of weeks in between so that the post can reach a new audience
- Be nice :)
Related communities
much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Non-profit and all this stuff is nice, but where is the dark secret?
No dark secret, Proton products are OpenSource, made by cientifics of the CERN in Swiss. They make its incommings with the premium products, serving the free ones without ads and trackings or loggings.
Makes me even more suspicious, I have to comprehend this.
More suspicious than an American commercial company offering the services? Proton is not a commercial company, they really do not need to make money with their services, all they charge you is the use of servers and hosts based on a certain amount of data that you claim, in the VPN they are one of the few that offer you a use of unlimited data with a more than acceptable speed in the free version, without ads, logs and military-level encryption, the only thing is a limited number of countries in the free version (23 server in three countries).
The same with Mail or the cloud service, where space is naturally limited in the free account, but privacy is the same as in the premium account at a very high level. If you don't trust it, you are also free to host the services yourself, since they are all OpenSource.
Sounds like a gigantic honeypot. To good to be true, it can’t be that I finally found someone I can trust, or can it?
You can, every product of a company which are not profit centered apart being OpenSource, by definition is way more trustworth than proprietary soft of big US companies. Proton services made it's fame because of its known reliability since a lot of years.
Protonmail, their flagship product, actually treats 99.9% of emails in clear-text. You can't have end-to-end encryption if the other person at the end doesn't support it. There have been (unverified) rumors that Proton could be a giant honeypot. They did help authorities in the past. Maybe we will understand better who they are in the future
They did cooperate with authorities, but they also took their time in disclosures to explain precisely what the user did wrong, and how you can avoid making the same mistakes. At the end of the day, Proton only has the information you provide them. And if you don't encrypt your stuff, it's not safe.
Proton serves privacy, not anonymity. They will not collect, harvest, analyse or sell your data. If you however use their services for illegal things they will forward whatever - usually little - unencrypted information they have about you.
I'm surprised people would expect them to behave differently. Do they expect Proton to not comply with lawful warrants?