I’ve been using Proton Mail and VPN for a while now, and I’m just wondering how everyone else feels about them. I have this kind of inherent alight distrust of them just because they seem like they offer a lot for free and kind of have a Big Tech vibe about them, but there’s nothing for me to really substantiate that distrust with, its mostly just a feeling. That being said, I do use their services as mentioned and they work pretty well, even on the free teir. So aside from that one instance where they gave that guy’s info to the feds, is there any reason not to trust them with my data?
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.
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Proton emails are stored in an encrypted form that goes beyond the simple authentication that is part of the POP/IMAP specifications
Proton does have open-source bridges/proxies, so they aren’t hiding these details from us
Perhaps Thunderbird could be enhanced to support the Proton features directly?
The issue I talked about was not privacy-wise. It just suck to have to use a package that is not in debian repository just to receive commercial emails. Updates are a pain. And it is the kind of software that people should keep up-to-date.
Ok, let’s talk about privacy. Email will never be secure because it was not designed to be and there are too many issues.
The subject line and other metadata are not encrypted. (from protonmail website). Most of the people use email to register to accounts and for commercial communications, where all valuables informations are in the object of the email.
There are more private way to communicate with people (like xmpp or matrix for example)
We kill people based on metadata. Well metadata encryption are pretty important.
So giving up convenience for 0 security sucks.
It would be great if there were an add-on for it. If someone knows how to develop it, please do it, it would improve UX a lot.
But it does not solve the issue completely. On mobile, the issue is still there (I know they have an app but I would prefer to have all my email at the same place). Also, if I want to use nextcloud mail, you have to developp an addon for nextcloud now.
Edit: changed the link for the alternative piped link suggested.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
We kill people based on metadata
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.