they are controlled opposition in my opinion, if you follow the money (i.e. financed primarily by google to my knowledge) and look at their current diversification in service offerings they appear to be ‘privacy-washed’ or ‘ethics-washed’ (for lack of a better term, the equiv. of greenwashing or pinkwashing for tech corps to appear ethical or progressive) with a push to appear as a feature-complete ‘privacy respecting’ alternative to google.

in my opinion proton is doing the same thing, esp atm with their push towards non-profit status. openai (which is obviously not open in any sense od the word in the industry they operate in) is also i believe governed by a non-profit entity… or at least the for-profit part of their company is.

non-profit status with larger organizations i think like any other large organization is not worth taking at face value, but idk someone here prob has a better handle on it than i do…