Proton’s mission, funding sources, independence, and community are some of the reasons we’re more resilient than other privacy-first companies.
I’m happy to support these guys, and I feel like I pay a fair price for the services I get.
What I love about them is that recently they had more people buying their password manager, than they planned for. This reduced the cost per user for them.
Instead of pocketing all of the profit gained from it, they sent out an email to all of their paid users, to let them know that they can now update their subscription for a discount.
It’s fuckin weird to see a company make a decision based on the long term retention of their customers rather than short term profits… I like these guys.
Deenshittification.
Engoodification
That’s so surreal in this day & age. I can’t think of any other example where that happened. I use Bitwarden because I don’t want all my eggs in one basket, even for Proton who I trust. But good on them for doing a solid for their customers instead of bowing to the forces of pure capitalism.
I finally upgraded my free account on Black Friday, couldn’t be happier. I so appreciate this kind of transparency and candor.
We are not billionaire subsidized, government subsidized, or even donation subsidized. Rather, we derive almost all of our revenues from selling services directly to users in a profitable way. Proton services are never going to be the cheapest, we’re not going to have flashy promotions, unlimited “lifetime” plans (unless it’s for charity), or offers that are too good to be true. Not just because it doesn’t suit us, but because it doesn’t suit the mission. Instead, we will charge a fair price that reflects our costs and can deliver long-term stability.
Is this in response to Skiff shutting down?
Yes, it’s mentioned in the post.
Not directly, I had to click through to a reddit post
Fuck skiff!!! Dirt bags took the devils money and sold out their user base
I hope they might consider a Proton Photos, since Google Photos really holds me to Google Drive. And Proton AI for working with documents on Proton Drive.
Proton Photos as a simple archive sure. Drive can already do that.
But they won’t be able to do any of the fancy AI driven features, as they would all require Proton to have direct access to the images. That goes against the whole idea of Proton.
Same problem with AI document features.
It would be cool if they offered a local client to do the AI processing but it’s not hard to see a few problems with that. It would be pretty difficult to sustain.
I mean iOS already does that locally, but since Photos is Apple’s app, unlike other apps, it can run in the background all the time while charging and do the ML stuff
I am not asking for a replacement to Google Drive, since that’s clear, I’m asking for a replacement to Google Photos, which means I’m referring to the functionality that makes Google Photos a separate product to Google Drive (aka, the fancy AI features, automatic image compression, automatic sorting, albums, search, etc).
I don’t know if it goes against Proton’s philosophy, that’s kind of besides the point. I’m just saying that for me to move from Google’s suite, as I would like to, this would be a blocker for me with Proton. It’s fine if Proton doesn’t want to address that market, it just means I personally would find it difficult to make the switch (and likely wouldn’t) even though I like a lot of what Proton is doing.
Actually it is possible to do it locally! A photo management service called Ente.io is already implementing it.
Can I interest you in a great self-hosted alternative Immich? Been using it for nearly a year now, amd its getting better every few months.
I’m sure it can work well for many others, so thanks for the recommendation, but personally I’m not interested in self hosting.
Thank you for this, been looking…
Proton Drive can already automatically back up your phones photos. What else do you want? Albums?
Yeah, that works fine.
All the things that make Google Photos a separate product to Google Drive… that’s what I’m talking about.
OK, we’ll they’re not going to have that. They’re just not going to implement facial recognition or search images by text or map the photos baed on the geolocation metadata. They’re just fundamentally anti privacy features. I doubt they’d even implement photo editing and callages or whatever
Have a look at photoprism. It’s self hosted.
They just released one a few months ago
Interestingly, the article mentions twice how Proton doesn’t do flashy marketing campaigns when that is precisely the aspect people have criticized Proton for years, usually around Black Friday when they portray the discount as much better than what it is.
I think it’s more like… They don’t do high dollar marketing strategies like superbowl advertisements.
I like proton but I hate their Black Friday discounts. Why not just make the products fairly priced all year round? Why should we have to wait to get good value?
Ask JC Penny
I’m scared to use my Proton email address much because I’m worried it will get filled with Spam like my gmail address :-/
That’s what the email alias company that proon bought last year and rolled into subscriptions is for.
Also, if you buy your own domain, which from cloudflare is like $10/year, you can turn on catchall and use anything@yourdomain and have it delivered. Then, if one of your anything addresses gets compromised, you just block all email going to there and move on.
I find unless you use the proton password manager the alias feature is too hard to manage from mobile anyway.
Maybe I’ll convert from my current manager to it, but I do like the idea of alias emails.
Bitwarden also has an alias service integration
It does but it is plus email addresses. So any half smart spammer will just remove anything in between the + and the @ With proton it is an entirely unique email address that cannot easily be tracked back to your email.
No I’m not talking about plus addresses. You can add an api key from addy.io or simplelogin and generate a unique address in Bitwarden
This is the help I was seeking :-)
People have given you some good ideas, but here’s another: DuckDuckGo has free email aliases. You generate a “duck” address and it’s just some random email address that gets forwarded to your real email address while also blocking any trackers in the emails. And you can easily turn off an alias if it becomes spammy.
It’s free and you don’t even have to make an account of any kind. To “log in” to their web browser and use this feature, all they do is send you an email with a link to click to make sure own that target email address. Then you can generate unlimited aliases that get redirected to it. But it’s up to you to track which alias was given to which website.
There’s also a master duck address that you make up manually. I guess that’s technically an account and that’s the one you “log in” with if you install the browser on another device. You don’t have to actually use their browser, and they even have a plugin for Firefox to generate the aliases.
Not as easy as having your own domain and forwarding email going to any address to your real account, though. But it’s totally free.
While good, a lot of features and services in proton are still half baked. I have ultimate.
What bothers you the most?
Not OP, but the lack of Linux support is my biggest issue with them.
Fuck. Really? I’m seriously considering switching to Proton but I’m also in the middle of moving to Linux and that’s not negotiable. Shit I took Linux support for granted.
The Linux client isn’t perfect, but you can download the openVPN config file and set up individual server connections yourself. It’s all laid out on their website, fairly simple. If you know what you’re doing, you can also edit the config files to allow IP-based split tunneling.
Ah, well the VPN client I config in my router so as long as Proton uses OpenVPN or WireGuard I should be able to get it to work, even though I barely know what I’m doing. Converting settings files manually to settings in pfSense is doable.
I can’t speak about pfsense or router-based configs, I have zero experience there. The Proton website does have openVPN and wire guard manual setup instructions though. You could try it with a free account first to make sure everything works before committing to paying for it. If you’re interested, I can show you the changes I made to the openVPN config file to allow split tunneling. Again though, I don’t know how that translates to pfsense.
Good to hear they have manuals for both OpenVPN and WireGuard. Thanks for the info. And thanks for offering to show me split tunneling, but I don’t think that’s necessary at the moment. But it’s great to know there’s a way to set it up like that, I’ll keep that in mind if I need it in the future.
I tried their OpenVPN config files but I always get IP leaks. Any idea on how to fix that? :(
I believe there’s a way to do it using iptables, but I’d have to look into it more again. You might get more experienced people answering if you search for “openVPN force traffic through VPN iptables” or something similar. Let me know if that helps!
Turns out the problem is that Proton does not support IPV6, at least via OpenVPN or WireGuard. Disabling ipv6 fixes the problem, though I don’t really enjoy that solution :|
I’m using proton bridge on debian…
Downloading a .deb file is admittedly not ideal and not “the debian way” but it works
Their VPN services should be accessible by any linux client (but i’ve not tried yet)
Thanks for the info. I see they have an RPM version, too. I hope works on OpenSUSE.
Generally, compatability:
No SMTP (so I can send emails automatically from my servers for logs etc), no calendar sync, email sync is only hacky with the bridge, android does not have email sync at all, no contacts sync.
The calendar does not show the birthdays of contacts.
Proton drive for me is useless because no GNU/Linux client (if it comes, pls just make it something I can run headless).
There is more, but that’s what I find most annoying. If I have to chose one of these then I’d say that the groupware stuff needs to be synced to any client easily (includes calendar and contacts IMO)
In the early days […] we often received a question along the lines of “I love the product and what Proton stands for, but how do I know you will still be around to protect my data 10 years from now?” […] Ten years and 100 million accounts later, we would like to think we have proven the point with our track record, but actually the question is just as relevant today as it was 10 years ago[.] […] Proton was not created to get rich[, …] but rather to address the […] problem of surveillance capitalism. […] Proton has always been about the mission and putting people ahead of profits […] and there is no price at which we would compromise our integrity. Frankly speaking, […] if the goal was to sell for a bunch of money, we could have done that long ago. […] Most businesses are built to be sold — we built Proton to serve the mission.
My problem is there’s literally ways you can organize a business that makes literally impossible to legally do these things. When businesses say these things, but don’t acknowledge the reality that they could always recharter the business in such a manner where you don’t just have to trust them to behave with no recourse if they don’t, I always have to add “but we still will continue to reserve the right to sell you out but pinky promise we won’t ever do it”
“ …ways you can organize a business that makes literally impossible to legally do these things. ”
Not disputing this is true, but could you provide some examples?
They’re talking about making it a nonprofit, I’m sure. People working for nonprofits can have good salaries so its not like they’re not good to work for, and any profit can be reinvested into the company or donated to other nonprofits. But you can’t sell the company to a for-profit (I don’t think), and the ownsers can’t take all of the profit for themselves.
I’ve keep seeing amazing things regarding proton in recent years, I think I’m overdue for a switch
I did the switch. Even if there’s no PPP pricing for my region it’s quite alright. I’m planning to migrate my whole family to Proton in the near future. We already have our chats with Signal and one other last thing is for media backup. We’re still using a combination of Google Photos and OneDrive to save our photos. Are there any good privacy oriented data storage solutions? I’m also saving up money to spin up my own self-hosted solution.
If you’re planning to subscribe to Proton Unlimited or Proton Family regardless, you might as well try Proton Drive. They try to be fairly privacy focused similar to Proton’s other products.
Mega has a similar privacy-oriented design. Such that the server side shouldn’t have direct access to your unencrypted file data or its decryption keys.
Still, any web-based service necessitates trusting the JavaScript you receive not to leak out your password or keys. Both Proton and Mega have a good track record so far in that regard, but the best practice for privacy with raw data storage is to encrypt your own data with local tools and treat any remote server as untrusted.
I could imagine a tool that makes cloud storage act like a remote hard drive, with sectors and everything. Where these “sectors” are just small binary files.
You have software locally that is setup to track local files and calculate how they are mapped to the remote sectors. When a file gets updated, or new ones are added, it shuffles things around in an efficient manner to keep the number of remote updates to a minimum, and then it only updates or adds the required sector files. This way a tiny edit to a 4 GB local file would only require a tiny upload to the server instead of resending a new encrypted copy of the entire 4 GB file.
Not only are the little sector files all encrypted with a private key known only to you, the file structure in this system doesn’t even make any sense to anyone but you.
However, if you lose you home PC and the file structure DB, the cloud copy becomes absolutely useless. Even if you had a backup of the private key.
Something like this surely already exists. Maybe there are even cloud storage providers who offer hard-drive like access to a block of data instead of being file-based.
EDIT: Turns out that’s what Proton Drive does. Kind of.
End-to-end encryption for large files
Proton Drive’s unique technology enables high-performance, client-side end-to-end encryption with large files by splitting large files into 4 MB chunks. Each chunk is signed with a hash to prevent removal or reordering. When you open or download a file, our file transfer and decryption algorithms ensure your data is rebuilt quickly in the correct order.
They say it’s client side, but the hashes that control the ordering must be stored on the server or else you couldn’t easily download the file on a other device. And I wonder if it’s still efficient if you make an exit in the middle of the file. Does it need to send the full 4GB all over again? Even having to send 2 GB all over again would be a lot.
Proton includes cloud storage and recently started supporting automatic backup of pictures on your phone.
Proton has their own cloud storage called Proton Drive. If you buy the top VPN tier I think it includes all of the premium Proton services, Drive included. I think it’s like 500 gigs for a single user account and 2 terabytes if you get the family account.
Mega was my option for family photo storage. Mainly used for instant upload to a shared folder between all of us.
As an added step, with some automations, my NAS server (TrueNAS) would sync my mega photo album to my local Nas storage. Files older than two years would be purged from mega and archives on my home NAS would stay intact.
Since then though I swapped mega out with my own personal self hosted nextcloud instance.
I love Proton and what they stand for but their Linux support is unfortunately quite bad. Everything feels half baked, at most.
I fucking don’t want to spend more money on services. It’s a nightmare. That’s why I started digging into self-hosting in combination with some core services that I would like to keep to stay into the practical part and don’t spend time configuring shit.
Which is fine. But self hosting has multiple complexities. It’s not just a case of installing and configuring a mail server. Maintenance, security, electric costs etc just add up.
I’d sooner have working emails and leave all the management to the provider.
I think even the most hardcore self hosting guys would probably caution most against setting up their own mail server too. One of the few things that has too many caveats to make self hosting make sense.
Keeping a simple nas alive, with automated backups from linux + windows based machines with proper authentication already sometimes feels like a second job. Hosting all of your own services is way more effort than people realise
I have a Pi4 that runs a couple of services to run in the house. Even this still needs regular OS patching, updated images pulling, troubleshooting etc.
I ran my own mail server many years ago but I can’t reliably do one anymore. Besides, death can happen at any point and I’d hate to leave my family with email mailboxes that are just gonna stop one day from something breaking or a domain not being renewed.
Damn companies, constantly taking money for their services and stuff.
I prefer mail.com it’s just easier to type out and remember.
Proton use a pm.me shortening for their services so checkmate, mate.
still too expensive though.
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Wild suggestion here. Type the word “Proton” in your search engine of choice and almost blindly click on the first link that comes up. Take as long as you need.
That. Or they could just read the article. Wild idea, I know lol
