Both things you observe happen, but that doesn’t absolve proton of its suspiciously misleading advertising They act like a honeypot. They redirect onion users

Both things you observe happen, but that doesn’t absolve proton of its suspiciously misleading advertising They act like a honeypot. They redirect onion users to an exit node undermining the point of having an onion service, they require a phone number for onion users instead of actually offering privacy. They rely in their fans to shield them from criticism while doing these privacy counterintuitive things. The same thing happened at a swiss encryption company for 50 years. Employees kept finding flaws in the encryption and kept getting told to work on anything else and it turned out to be a CIA front intentionally selling backdoored encrypted communication devices worldwide [1]. When proton is doing the same thing and has an even more obvious ownership structure incentivized to keep a charade up, there is no reason to use proton for any of the reasons they advertise. [1] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-51487856 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-51487856 (BBC, find a source you happen to respect that corroborates the same thing)