All of this convinced me to give up on moving all my accounts to their service and just use the iCloud service I already pay for. Trying to get away from GMail and Google’s privacy policies, but it felt like these moves indicated greater change coming to a service I was sincerely optimistic about prior.
I won’t be using these features, but I’m not sure there’s cause for concern. The implementation seems very sensible and legitimately privacy-centric. The LLM runs locally and is meant as an very basic email proofreader. The crypto wallet is a likely an extension of the password management tech they’ve already developed, with transaction features that some people care about.
I can see why some people want these features, and I’m glad there are new alternatives.
Coming from someone who hasn’t gotten into the weeds with this company, my understanding was that they did email. I was considering migrating over to them in order to de-google completely.
This move, specifically, has caused me to reconsider and scrap those plans. Not every tech company needs to peddle ai and crypto bullshit.
… they do email, but they also do other things. They still do email better than the alternatives.
It’s kind of like if Chipotle came out with hamburgers and you were like “well I want a burrito but I’ll never get one of their burritos now, they’re just like all the other fast food now.”
I feel like some people just hear “crypto” or “ai” and start screeching and clawing at the air.
Not every feature needs to be for you specifically, these features are optional and don’t compromise or even impact their other products. They seem to be on-brand in being more privacy-focused alternatives to some of the existing market options while remaining accessible, and keeps Proton in the game depending on how the landscape develops.
I don’t use Proton (yet) but I generally like what they’re doing and hope they succeed, and I don’t see any of these developments as negatives, just more competition.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=scTjHvot3Uo To those who downvote, haven’t you learned that centralisation of services always ends horribly, remember Reddit, twitter, Google, remember why do we go to lemmy, why do we use Linux and self host services, because we wanted decentralised system that won’t enshitify as a whole, even if something goes bad, like meta’s threads, you can isolate it, yes? But if everything was centralised like in Facebook and others, could you do the same thing? Of course not, never forget folks, centralisation never goes well in the long run, but in short term it’s gonna be great if course
So much for my plan of looking into a Proton mail account.
