There are two themes in this article that end up both being flawed: - Proton’s not an honest/forthright company in terms of open source and for-profit status

There are two themes in this article that end up both being flawed: - Proton’s not an honest/forthright company in terms of open source and for-profit status - Proton is flawed technically and isn’t really encrypting your data. Starting with the former, I think the author is letting perfect get in the way of good. Proton has a whole lot of open source going on with their products and that is a whole lot more than anyone else in the space considering the breadth of their products. I don’t blame the author for misunderstanding some complicated technical concepts, but they are sound concepts. Yes, a service like this needs to make money to be viable long-term. Having a non-profit parent company is way better than being a public company with public shareholder pressure or being owned by Bain Capital. As far as the second theme here, the author is just plain mistaken on Proton’s encryption. The author is just misunderstanding the technical aspects of the services and goes further than that by accusing Proton of AI marketing copy, which I am personally not seeing. It looks like normal, sensible, and pretty easy to understand writing to me. I can understand if these concepts are difficult to grasp for the general public but I’m not seeing any problems, and there’s also a lot of third party auditing transparency as well. It might be nice if Proton offered a more user-friendly alternative to PGP encryption for non-technical non-Proton email recipients, like using some kind of secure temporary link inside an unencrypted email, but also, Proton doesn’t have to be the one to provide that service. The author is asking Proton to do the impossible and fix the flaws of email. And you still have a really nice benefit that every Proton user you email has e2e encryption baked in. There’s really no other service with as significant user base offering that. The author goes on to accuse Proton of spreading themselves too thin despite having a really strong product portfolio. There’s really nothing that their apps are missing besides strong photo organization in Proton Drive similar to something like Ente, Google Photos, iCloud Photos, Immich, etc. They’re pretty much a one-stop shop for everything you could want and are a drop-in replacement for big tech cloud suites with a very respectably better privacy footprint. Finally, I’ll address the political bit even though I shouldn’t: I’ll just say that a company’s CEO having opposite political beliefs of you is a very legitimate reason to not patronize that company. If the author feels like they can’t be a Proton customer because of public statements made by the CEO, good on them. That’s why CEOs pragmatically shouldn’t talk in a partisan way so they don’t alienate customers. With that said, good luck finding a company with a CEO who isn’t right-leaning. Sometimes a perfect choice isn’t available on the market and you just have to go with the best available one.