I see that Proton’s very hard at work convincing me to migrate.
I haven’t always been actively enthused about some of the things Proton has decided to build out, but this may be the first time I’ve been legitimately disappointed.
I don’t really understand how it’s possible to both not store data in plaintext, but also be able to siphon off some of it in plaintext. Like is this technically possible in the way they suggest it? We shoot off the plaintext before it gets to our storage servers?
Like at some point that means the communication is not encrypted right? But if you’re using https and all good normal security standards that should never be the case from the moment it departs your terminal?
I have a small amount of knowledge about this but it’s the dangerously small type so any illumination would be appreciated.
Email is never stored unencrypted at rest on Proton’s servers. But AI prompts, which are likely your entire draft email, do exist unencrypted at rest on their servers. That’s what has the privacy nerds screaming.
yep! and the important thing to understand about proton is, the end to end encryption (where one end is the sender of a message and the other is the receiver — Proton never handles plaintext at all, beyond a tiny and clearly called out amount of metadata stored as plaintext on their servers for stuff like Calendars) is the whole point of the thing, there’s no reason to use Proton without it. with this LLM garbage, Proton’s threat model has shifted such that you can’t trust that the other end’s plaintext didn’t get transmitted to Proton’s servers (there’s no way for you, the receiver, to tell that the sender didn’t use the cloud LLM features), which makes Proton a lot less useful for some of the most vulnerable people who use it, such as activists and journalists who might be under legal threat. this plaintext leak allows some of the messages you’ve received to be subpoenaed, and it’s very easy for that to be used in a criminal case against you.
also, Proton’s published security model for their LLM feature (which is ultra-thin and resembles a PR puff piece more than any other model they published before this) states that their no-log policy is what makes the cloud version of the LLM secure, but their no-log policy has gigantic holes in it, and Proton’s response to these concerns is utterly unbefitting of a privacy/security software company
I’d personally consider that sufficient grounds to accuse Proton of stealing its customers’ data.
At the (miniscule) risk of sounding unnecessarily harsh on tech, any customer data that gets sent to company servers without the customer’s explicit, uncoerced permission should be considered stolen.
i don’t understand, what’s stopping you from just not using it if you don’t want it? am i missing something?
edit: lol i was open to learning but nvm i guess
My frustration at least is blended between 2 related thoughts that seem to generally be shared with a large group of people, if not the majority. 1) IMO crypto is BS. 2) Building on that base, they are diverting dev resources away from improving their existing systems or developing a new product with broader appeal to instead service said BS.
So as someone who recently switched to proton before this BS, what’s good to switch to?
Depends a lot on what you’re looking for. If you just want email, then you have a lot of options. Mailbox.org, Posteo, tuta, mailfence, fastmail, and runbox all come to mind. If you want a full gsuite replacement, ala proton unlimited, then your options are limited.
IMO you gotta consider the email and calendar functions as inseparable, whereas the rest of the Google bundle can be teased apart. Privacy Guides is perhaps a bit too stingy with their recommendations, but at minimum they give you a lot of food for thought when they lay out their criteria:
https://www.privacyguides.org/en/email/ https://www.privacyguides.org/en/calendar/
I host my calendar on Nextcloud and email (currently) through Protonmail. What makes them inseparable?
Well, you know better than me, because I’ve never not used them together.
How do you, for example, invite people to things? Does your calendar just send an ICS attachment to Proton on SMTP? How do you RSVP for other people’s invites? Do you download the event to your calendar and separately respond in proton? Do you get updates in the calendar app about other people’s RSVP status, or just emails?