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

94 points

Well, I was contemplating Protonmail…

I’m in the process of degoogling and dewindowing. I’ll be dammed if I’m going towards ANYthing even related to"artificial intelligence" if I can help it.

Feckin bullshit.

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31 points

I’m pretty happy with Tutanota all things considered. There are some tradeoffs back and forth between the two, but I think it’s neat they run on renewable energy. And they’re very focussed on being open source which I also appreciate.

Maybe an option worth looking into. They’re also encrypted (though I wish either them or proton had an option not to be) and have a free tier)

Hope you find what you’re looking for!

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8 points

I’ve been using Mailbox.org. I tried Tutanota but the domain name was just awful.

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10 points

I recommend you get your own domain, then you can’t ever lose your email.

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5 points

Well it is just tuta now so there is that

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6 points

Thanks

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6 points

I’ll mention I went to Fastmail (mainly because they’re an Aus company as well as the privacy stuff), so far so good.

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32 points
*

fastmail is viciously anti union however https://union.place/@fastmailunited/112672408714595554

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20 points

ah fuck I wasn’t aware of this, thanks for mentioning

off the list they go

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7 points
*

Yeah I saw that, pretty shitty. I also didn’t even realise they had a US division, given how they tout themselves as an Australian company.

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-6 points

It’s not even in the consumer version. Also it’s a optional local LLM running in your browser for basic stuff

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24 points

though to be honest, the fact that you think this is local-only and only affects business accounts perfectly demonstrates how fucking dangerous Proton’s marketing and design around this feature is

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50 points
*

Eamonn Maguire, author of the Proton Scribe announcement post, responded to my tweet with this: https://x.com/EamonnMagu14645/status/1814062340863651965

We built this as an opt-in alternative to the non-privacy centric options on the market.

Our goal is always privacy by default, we want to make that possible in the GenAI world too given the number of businesses already using it, and the privacy risks other options pose.

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22 points
*

not sure how legit that account is, actually. It’s not the one I @'ed - this one was created in Jan 2024 - either it’s his low-key alt or a bot

perhaps his plausible deniability account.

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18 points

do you get banned from twitter if you call him a fucking asshole?

I’m working on a more detailed reply on mastodon but to be honest, I’m pretty sure he didn’t read the original post

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17 points

it all stinks so much. He calls it “opt-in” but the official description of that opt-in is:

If you try to use Proton Scribe, you will be prompted to chose between local and server-side. So, technically, it’s not active until you decide how, and if, you want to use it.

as you can see here: https://mastodon.social/@protonprivacy/112807462045101580

there is opt-in and then there is dangling an expired hotdog

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45 points

the usefulness of any feature should be measured in how deep you can bury its “opt-in” option in the settings pages without hurting its adoption

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42 points

Great, just as I’ve decided to switch some services to Proton (mail and VPN).

Now I’ll have to reconsider this decision.

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-13 points
*

The fact that you never realized that you should’ve self hosted since all corporations will inevitably follow the money, and that politics will always be tied to money, therefore all corporations will make political decisions against your interests makes me lose hope in common sense.

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60 points

it’s time for you to fuck off back to your self-hosted services that surely aren’t just a stack of constantly broken docker containers running on an old Dell in your closet

but wait, what’s this?

@BaroqueInMind@lemmy.one

oh you poor fucking baby, you couldn’t figure out how to self-host lemmy! and it’s so easy compared with mail too! so much for common sense!

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34 points

back to your self-hosted services that surely aren’t just a stack of constantly broken docker containers running on an old Dell in your closet

I feel personally attacked

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16 points

*looks at collection of automation and infrastructure for personal and business services, built with going on 20y of knowledge* boy it sure is easy to diyolo some qemu vms myself and not have to pay aws! I’m going to tell everyone else they’re doing it wrong!!!

(I mean, it legitimately is fairly easy to do a lot of this, but gotta grok the shit and not having the grok is ofc alllll up in aws’ product suite)

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12 points

they go to react conferences, too

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31 points

don’t shame people for not having the capacity to run their own infra, jeez

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10 points

@BaroqueInMind @cordlesslamp You unironically use words like “windoze” don’t you?

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34 points

Right after this I spot the announcement post on my front page, in !protonprivacy@lemmy.world. I’m surprised just how positive the comments are.

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32 points

Same, tbh. I went on their subreddit expecting a shitstorm but the announcement sits at like 85% upvotes with mostly positive replies.

What kind of bizarro world have I stumbled into?

At least the top-level comments seem to be split.

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33 points

between that thread’s activity pattern and how hard they tried to fudge the numbers on their own survey to make this feature look popular: boy there’s a lot of stank on this one

but hey here’s some worrying shit straight from the Proton team:

Our business audience was the most interested in a writing assistant, this is why we started gradually rolling it out starting with Business and Visionary plans. We will look into making it available to more users at a later date!

so there’s something utterly fucking obvious for the “it’s only for business users” posters to consider; they’re doing the same frog boiling shit that all LLM fuckheads do.

I’m tempted to crosspost David’s article and my mastodon thread to that community, since Proton hasn’t really replied otherwise, and they seem plenty active there answering softball questions and removing posts. I don’t look forward to the Kagi-level shitstorm in my inbox afterwards though

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22 points

the thing about this is a “writing assistant” doesn’t have to be integrated into the email product. It could be a product in itself. If the “business audience(?) was the most interested in a writing assistant” you’ve got a fucken great standalone product opportunity on your hands. A Proton-certified LLM writing assistant that is magically better and more secure than anything else out there is not something you coyly slip into the email client and nudge everyone to use.

It doesn’t matter what reasons they have for doing this. Their method of deployment says more than enough to me. They know it’s off-script and they know they want their fucken “audience” to do the marketing for them.

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15 points

Reddit content is paid/generated content. It is literally part of their commercial offering to customers that they can expertly deceive their users. It is an advertising platform and you use it to try and force a public image.

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