Swiss company Proton is further expanding its productivity suite. In addition to an email service, calendar, VPN, password manager, and drive, Proton Sheets is now available. It is an alternative to Microsoft Excel and Google Sheets, an increasingly important advantage as countries take sovereignty more seriously.
Yeah, that mess was quite disappointing. I’m still waiting for them to make a clarifying statement on it. I suppose removing it and just not getting further involved in politics is at least “better” than continuing to double down.
Well, hope you like AI shit too because the people at proton are in love with vibe coding. Get ready for your data to be exfilled by a prompt injection in a spam email.
Source?
https://lemmy.org/post/1309818
People found AI config files in their public repos. When they were found, Proton deleted all discussion of it and then altered the repository history to pretend the config files were never there.
Shady, scummy behavior. They’ve tried to do the same ‘delete everything and ignore it’ when their CEO publicly praised Trump and the Republican party, and then kept doubling down in reddit and mastodon comments until someone on the PR team wrested the account away from him and started mass-deleting all of it.
Unfortunately news reports- and even people- discussing his praise of Trump and the republican party often do not know that there was more than just the 1 or 2 statements he made, so it seems like it was at least slightly successful in that case.
Is this a trustworthy analysis? I wanted to understand what happened. I am confused after reading this a while back, but still seeing people actively saying he praised Trump. I do what to know exactly what happened in the end to make a judgement. I really want to know if I’m missing something.
https://medium.com/@ovenplayer/does-proton-really-support-trump-a-deeper-analysis-and-surprising-findings-aed4fee4305e
https://lemmy.zip/post/30061526 https://lemmy.zip/post/30250238
Decide for yourself. There are screenshots and web archives scattered across the comments.
I’m so, so tired of seeing that fucking article by ‘ovenplayer’ over and over again. It’s not your fault, mind you, but damn do I wish that abomination would get erased from the internet.
It’s incredibly biased, missing a ton of information, and just frankly outright lies to frame the whole thing as positively towards Proton as possible, and completely skips mentioning Proton’s attempted cleanup job. Even worse, it pretends to sound neutral while doing all that to try and gaslight people into thinking it’s actually a full journalistic dive into the issue.
I’m like 90% sure it’s just Proton’s PR team creating an easy astroturf- an account that was made JUST to post that article, nothing else, created right at the same time as the Proton PR team started working on the whole issue?
The only reason it’s only 90% instead of 100% is because there’s a lot of proton apologists who think Proton supporting this shit is ‘blown out of proportion’ because they have no idea what they’re talking about, but feel personally attacked because someone isn’t supporting ‘their team.’
I legitimately want to learn the proper timeline with no bias. Is there a good source out there? Because I am genuinely confused.
Unfortunately I haven’t seen one yet- I would like to, so I could provide it to people in situations like this, but none of them have e.g. the now-deleted doubling-down Yen did on the official account, or noting the ‘88’ in his usernames, or even most of the mastodon clusterfuck beyond ‘they left mastodon after backlash.’
I was there reading most of it, but unfortunately I didn’t think to save screenshots of any of it, which is why I know it all happened, but this was also several months ago and I couldn’t recite the exact timeline anymore.
The long and short of it that when Andy Yen posted that, it immediately blew up on mastodon and reddit- along with presumably twitter, but I have that DNS blocked, so I have no further insights to that one, and frankly there’s enough weirdos on there that I don’t even want to know how that went down.
Mastodon, to my knowledge, was fairly bog-standard and I think most of it is still there, because proton’s PR team couldn’t lean on anyone to get it all purged. I suspect that’s the real reason why they left mastodon. Most of their posts involved were edited to be a lot less concerning sounding, however.
Reddit, on the other hand, had (presumably) Yen posting on the Proton official account (example that WAS archived by a very smart person who clearly saw proton for who they were: https://archive.ph/quYyb - that post no longer exists) doubling down for a while before someone else clearly took the reigns and started trying to play damage control, at which point andy yen got on his own reddit account and kept doubling down on it, using a ton of really concerning buzzwords. I remember reading him complaining about ‘the woke’ being ‘triggered’ at one point and just being like ‘What the fuck am I even reading right now.’ All of that was also edited away or deleted, but you can still find user replies to him boggling at him using GOP language that are unedited in the reddit threads that weren’t nuked.
Also revealed during all this is that Andy Yen’s personal reddit account is ‘andy1011000’. For those of you that don’t know, 1011000 is binary for ‘88.’ As in, the very famous nazi dogwhistle. While you can argue it may have another meaning- and I’m sure people will- the simple fact of the matter is that announcing your support for an authoritarian fascist with an encoded nazi dogwhistle in your username is a bad look, especially if you categorically refuse to acknowledge or change it when it’s pointed out to you. I know several people born in 1988 who used to have 88 in their usernames who instantly and comprehensively ditched those usernames the very second they found out what it meant, but Yen still uses it to this day.
Thank you for writing all of this out! Very interesting.
I’m well aware of their CEO positions, but they have no impact on the security while using LLMs does. I understand people that stopped using Proton services because of any of their past actions, but until now nothing they did compromised the security of the products.
Will be interesting to see what their next annual independent security audit will say.
I mean, their security IS directly impacted by their support of a fascist government. They’ve already happily gave over personal information of an account owner to authorities when asked- the security posture doesn’t matter when they choose to circumvent it.
More to the point- they have a history of deleting proof of misdeeds and pretending they never happened. That is not what you want to see from a company touting its security!
Everyone should expect companies to give up any information they have because no CEO will go to prison for you, but they can’t give what they don’t have. If you know of any company that will go to prison for me, let me know.
As far as the case of sharing an IP address, it was made under Swiss court order and IP logging was only enabled after the court order and for that specific account only. And Swiss law at the time required review under Swiss privacy law for order to be granted, which has very high bar to be granted. So I wouldn’t classify that as “happily”. The content itself was never shared since Proton doesn’t have access.
Their marketing is shady as fuck, their foundation structure is a joke (CEO of the for profit entity has a voting majority) and they do hide like little chidren at any public pushback (like leaving Mastodon after the whole Trump/republicans debacle), but so far nobody raised any issues with their cryptographic security and they passed every single independent security audit.
It would be fair to discourage people from using for any of the above bullshit, but security is not one of them and bullshit claims like that just hurt privacy advocacy and keeps people in the existing monopolies.
I genuinely tried to find the source for this but all I got from google were ads for vibe coding and proton’s own AI. So take this half-remembered anecdote with a grain of salt, I guess. Best i’ve got is this