I’m trying to get rid of my Google dependency and one of those steps was moving over to Protonmail. Now in the past few days i have been picking up signals that even Protonmail is not as clean as it might be.
Does this really impact the privacy of how i use email and so is moving to Protonmail a step forward from Google, or is Protonmail just as bad?
If so, what could be alternatives?
edit:
Some of the alternatives being mentioned in the comments are:
Email:
VPN:
edit 2 (2023):
There seems to be some new activity around this post. At the time of writing the post (2 years ago) there were some stories going as user @UnfortunateShort described in their comment. This made me question the best options available at that moment. Currently i am still a Proton user, using their Mail and Calendar service, and Mullvad for VPN.
I’ve been using protonmail/vpn for a few years now. I’ve had nothing but positive experiences. That said, I think its healthy to question any business, especially those that claim to care about your privacy. I’m curious to hear what signals you’ve picked up on.
There was this thing where a court forced them to log the IP and recipients mail addresses of a Prortonmail user, which was used as evidence against them in a legal process.
They released a statement that they do not collect this data unless a court orders them to, that they can’t and won’t collect the content of mails, which is within the law apparently, and that the law cannot force them to collect data from their VPN. They also removed the promise to never collect any data from their sites and documents, because they felt it was not appropriate under the legal circumstances.
If you want to hear my opinion about it: I give them credit for handling this transparently, explaining exactly what happened and removing a false claim from their marketing voluntarily. I do also agree that they should have never misled people into thinking Protonmail is an anonymous way of communication.
As the data collection is very limited and has to be ordered by a Swiss court, I do not feel threatened and continue to use their services.
Frankly, I think if you’re actually fearing to be persecuted for something and don’t want people to figure out who you talked to, you shouldn’t use mails to begin with. And if you do, at least use a VPN or Tor. That’s how they got the user, because they didn’t and law enforcement figured out they use Protonmail + their IP with the help of the ISP.
Is this post two years old? If so I think we can wait a long time for a reply from OP. I too would like to know what signals they picked up on.
Has it been two years already?! Well that’s quite some time!
In short, with the steps Proton has taken in the past two years to improve their products, i am a very happy customer! Currently i am using Proton mail and Proton calendar. For a VPN i use Mullvad at the moment and i can really recommend them for a VPN service.
Regarding the VPN, i had been using Mullvad before Proton started offering theirs. Currently i am weighing of if i should use Proton for my VPN services as well, or keep some things separated between different companies, just in case.
Hah, well, two years later here you still are. Amazing!
Love to hear it! I’m also on proton, if only for mail. I’m looking forward to a storage service with support for sync, so far I’m not so happy with the product I’m using.
I check in here now and then. ;)
So 5 months later, I still use Proton Mail, still loving it. Use it in combination with Proton Calendar which also works really nice and just started really using the Proton Drive as (in the future) an alternative for Google Drive now that they have added encrypted photo sync. That feature (for Android) is still very early and i have been in touch with the helpdesk for some of the issues i am running into. But they do really feel like issues because of it being a very first version.
So for now i would say that their Drive option is quite robust and works very nice and can really serve as an alternative for one of the other big parties (yes i still do a lot with Google Drive and Dropbox so to fully migrate that will take ‘some’ time).
So what are those signals you picked up? I am curious since I am a PM customer.
