Comment by TheDorkfromYork@lemm.ee on Proton Mail goes AI, security-focused userbase goes ‘what on earth’

we appear to be the first to write up the outrage coherently too. much thanks to the illustrious @self

Shouldn’t the headline be about unencrypted text prompts, rather than AI?

I read the article. What is the problem?

it’s an article about a poorly-designed feature that doesn’t accomplish any of its marketed goals and was hoisted upon Proton’s users in spite of their objections

this is an article about AI

“unencrypted text prompts”

can’t tell if this is because bond movies or marvel movies or fatf movies or heist movies or … but good god some people just have no fucking idea whatsoever

the model execution environment can quickly solve FHE in an afternoon, for a treat. after that it has to get back to piano practice tho!

their self reported system requirements to run the local LLM don’t sound like the average office dell spec (sorry for using screenshots)

and the “opt in” flow appears to make no effort to explain the critical privacy difference between local and server llms

https://proton.me/support/proton-scribe-writing-assistant#system-requirements

god, the pure fucking dark pattern of the option that leaks plaintext being the default, with a description that’s only its upsides, while the local option sounds quite a bit shit in comparison

also, I keep meaning to ask: does this “free for 14 days” trial auto-renew? cause that’s a real shitty dark pattern too if interacting with the feature starts your subscription. in fact, isn’t that illegal in some jurisdictions?

The trouble is that Proton has announced and implemented Scribe in a manner that sends up huge red flags for their privacy-focused techie base.

Proton Mail’s privacy-focused users are worried about the Scribe announcement because they’ve never seen Proton be so vague and nonspecific about security and threat models.

Up to now, Proton has been serious about privacy

It’s not about AI. It’s about privacy and communication.

fucking incredible, you managed to cherry pick some of the few sentences in the article that don’t use the words “AI” or “LLM”! good for you, you exhausting motherfucker

they really came out of the woodwork today, huh

oh. perhaps you could explain this to the authors of the article?

Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here’s the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.

This is not debate club. Unless it’s amusing debate.

For actually-good tech, you want our NotAwfulTech community

Proton Mail goes AI, security-focused userbase goes ‘what on earth’(pivot-to-ai.com)

TechTakes

!techtakes@awful.systems

Community stats

Community moderators