Andy did not endorse Trump, just the Republican nominee for antitrust. Nevertheless, we have retracted the statement, which was put out by mistake due to an internal miscommunication. Proton is not controlled by any single person but by the nonprofit Proton Foundation, which has neutrality in its governing principles, and that remains the case today.
Andy, or someone else, posted what can be read as an endorsement[1].
> Until corporate Dems are thrown out, the reality is that Republicans remain more likely to tackle Big Tech abuses.
Putting aside that this was a divisive statement, the problem emerged when this was posted by the official company account.
For the duration of time that this was the official response, it's not unreasonable for the public to assume that Andy, or someone else, endorsed a political party using the official company account.
This is the core of what caused the incident to escalate.
It was later retracted, and followed up with a statement[2] on the incident.
The irony is that this was already changing: anti-trust has been massively empowered under Biden and Lina Khan. Trump is certainly attempting to bandwagon this tide, but the appearance of so many Big Tech leaders in VIP seats at his inauguration does not lend a favourable hindsight view to Andy Yen's statement.
Is that really true? What did Lina Khan do to thwart big tech and enforce antitrust laws to a greater extent? I feel like there was mostly blockers for M&A that allowed startups to exit, but little real impact on big tech.
The most vocal supporter of Lina Khan's work over the last few years has been JD Vance... while I can't remember a single democrat voicing even close to the same support.
JD Vance vocally supported her, then the administration he is part of fired her as soon as it was able.
By contrast, Democrats nominated her to be commissioner, officially it was Biden who did so but Elizabeth Warren, another Democrat, is the one who really pushed for it.
Words don't mean shit compared to action.
With your kind of reasoning its pretty obvious why America is currently driving itself off a cliff.
She led the FTC to bring lawsuits against Meta, Amazon, and Microsoft. Although two of the cases have been blocked in the courts, this alone was unthinkable in previous administrations. She's also helped enforce policies like right-to-repair and click-to-cancel which threaten big tech's market share. Like it or not she's played a massive part in shifting the narrative on antitrust. Trump's dismissal of her along with Big Tech's front-row seats at his inauguration and general sycophantism are not good signs for antitrust.
Sorry, your CEO tainted any respect I have for your organization. I was planning on move to your service this year. Now I am looking else where.
The statement maybe retracted but the message and statement and ideology remain. I cannot trust your organization based on your CEO.
The irony is the collection of big-tech that showed up for and financially supported Trump. This has a great profound outlook on real antitrust action towards those individuals and their organizations. Actions are more verbose than words but often ignored.
As a long-time user and a volunteer on the translation team, I can't begin to express my disappointment with this.
I've subscribed to Proton for several years, and I now deeply regret my decision. Regardless of any explanations about the removal of the statement or internal miscommunication, the damage is already done.
Proton Drive through Proton Unlimited. I have my e-mail setup through Proton already, so the plan was going to be to consolidate, and use Proton for cloud storage as well. I have since downgraded back to Mail Plus. The reason being a pretty bad experience with Drive.
I honestly don't remember the fine-grained details, sorry, but it had something to do with waking up one morning to my remaining storage being consumed by every file in Drive being duplicated, with a title "(overwritten 21h4m)" or something like that appended to each one.
I can't remember what caused it, but what I do remember is that there was no way to remediate it through the Drive app itself. Meaning, if I wanted to return my drive back to its original state, I would be burning my own time to write the script to do it, or I would be burning my own time to research some other solution. I couldn't believe the feature was shipped in that state.
In my opinion, if there exists a feature that leads to all of my files being duplicated, then it shouldn't be released unless there has been thorough testing against that feature's ability to remediate the fubarred status that it has enacted to "protect" my files. In this case, I think the feature was version history.
So the three conclusions I could come to were that there was little to no testing, inexperienced engineers, or a project manager that isn't managing the project particularly well. In any case, I don't want to feel like I'm beta testing features with my most important files, so I went back to Dropbox and its more mature app. Haven't looked back since.
We are not affiliated with Crypto AG. Our encryption occurs client-side, our cryptographic code is open source, and our tech can and has been independently verified.
Hi there, Proton is backed by subscribers rather than VC investors, advertisers and selling data to third-parties. Both SimpleLogin and Standard Notes are open source community-driven projects, and for more on what makes Proton different, see: https://proton.me/blog/sustaining-mission-over-time
Is this a automated bot response? The main critique of the parent comment isn't that Proton engaging in many project, because of investors/ad revenue, but the act of doing so.
I'm a active Protonmail subscriber too, who downgraded to the mail business plan, because I too want Proton to focus on their core business and not engage in becoming a clone of Microsoft 365.
There used to be a regular vote on what users are mainly interested in. Maybe I missed it, but I too think that the risk of engaging in too many ventures will be the ultimate downfall. One last argument is, that hosting files and text and whatever is planned in the future weakens the legal ground to protect user privacy, as the (legal and technical) attack surface of hosting services is greater than just end-to-end encrypted email.
Looking at other responses posted by that account, I think they might be a bot or just pasting AI-generated responses.
That said, I think privacy oriented people are desperate for exactly what you said you don’t want - a Microsoft 365 equivalent that is privacy oriented. I’d be willing to pay for it personally, and don’t think it automatically follows that launching a new product makes existing ones worse. Maybe they’ll get a lot more users that purchase the overall bundle and help them fund all these ventures better than ever before.
No, we don't use bots to respond to questions here. Automated messages from us (which we sometimes use in our support ticketing system) are always marked as such.
Hi there, the above is not an AI response. We were just sharing that creating privacy focused tools without the backing of big tech takes time and effort. We have a lot planned for 2024 to round out our suite of privacy products, and we're excited for what we can accomplish with the support of the community.
You can also check out our feature request platform and change the category to planned or completed to see recent activity https://protonmail.uservoice.com
Just a tip, here on HN we like talking to _people_ in the comments. Founders and senior managers, for preference. But anyone willing to give their name and role in the company will often do.
Your comments so far read as detached and impersonal, especially with the more than conspicuous usage of plural pronouns.
> Proton is backed by subscribers rather than VC investors,
So I really hope you listen to us, the subscribers, and try to keep focus on improving the products that you have already launched and that we are paying for, before getting distracted on other projects.
Honestly the basic features that are still missing from Calendar are becoming a bit embarrassing. It's also embarrassing for me with my business clients when my calendar system is the only one that doesn't seem to function like a normal calendar does - and they see that too.
You've done an amazing job with product development so far - especially Email - but please don't squander that. Some of your products really really need basic missing features and bugs sorted - and quickly, because you've already sold them to customers. I get the sense that your customers are unusually loyal (which is to your credit) but goodwill won't last forever.
Thank you for your feedback. We're working on improving the Proton Calendar offer, currently making sure that our iOS app is on par with its Android equivalent (we've recently made it possible to add participants directly from the app, as well as some additional convenience features). Once this is finished, we'll look into other planned improvements for Proton Calendar.
Fine - please fix email threads in the android email app. I feel what OP is saying when a basic feature expected of any email client is still absent. I say this as a multi-year, mostly satisfied customer.
From that perspective, we would prefer to focus efforts on securing the Proton account as much as possible. There are two actions the user can already take.
First, enabling 2FA will take the risk of compromise down to almost zero (our data on compromised accounts supports this also).
Hi there, this is not an AI generated response. We are replying to the comment on attack surfaces, and how our focus is on securing a single Proton account by enabling 2FA and Proton Sentinel rather having to manage security for multiple accounts.
Please speak to your superiors and let them know that this corporate style rings poorly on hackernews. See if they can at least let you speak more personally, less press release. It may go a long way towards improving perceptions here. Or at least credibility.
I'll cut the corporate account some slack; the parent commenter's criticism is sarcastic and a straw man.
I got the point of the proton account politely saying "we secure the account holistically and having an additional product is not an expansion of attack surface".
Thanks for the feedback! We released a new feature on iOS: a new calendar invite widget now shows the main event info in all emails that contain event invites. Tapping on it takes you to the Proton Calendar app directly from your inbox.
We apologize if the previous message sounds like we don't care. On the contrary, we've communicated with you over other channels and done our best to help.
Our team's top priority is your experience with our services, and we take your feedback very seriously, as it helps us improve daily.
We hope to see you back someday and bury the hatches. If there's anything we can do to change your mind, please don't hesitate to email us directly at community@proton.me
