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  • Lately, their posts on Mastodon became full of comments questioning their CEO political views. I guess, this is the answer to those, a clear one.

  • Iโ€™d say this move seems too dumb even for fiction, if that wasnโ€™t the SOP for the entire country I live in.

    Given the context though, Iโ€™m curious if one of you privacy experts can change my mind on how I approach email.

    I donโ€™t use email for any meaningful communication where I expect privacy. It is essentially the way for companies and a few other organizations to send me low priority information and/or confirm my identity to reset a password or whatever. Because of that, the only attributes of an email service I really care about are reliability and availability, including not having emails silently blocked for not coming from a โ€œtrustedโ€ provider.

    So what is the practical risk of just using a Gmail address for that stuff, equivalent to hiding in plain sight? Yeah it helps Google fine tune their advertising model for me, while Iโ€™m running Linux on all my machines and blocking ads on any device I touch. My social media is Lemmy and my streaming service is Jellyfin.

    Am I risking too much if I use it as the corporate contact point that it is? Am I just letting my white/straight/cis/male privilege show through?

    • I donโ€™t use email for any meaningful communication where I expect privacy. It is essentially the way for companies and a few other organizations to send me low priority information and/or confirm my identity to reset a password or whatever.

      As a privacy enthusiast (expert seems too much), this immediately stood out. Privacy is the context of emails means that all my data which includes the content of the messages but also the metadata (who I talk to, which services I use - like in your example -, when I communicate, how often, etc.) is kept private, meaning not used for anything else than providing me the service (i.e., let me send and receive emails). From this point of view, even if you consider the content of your emails not sensitive, already the fact that you do use company X (because they sent you a password reset email) is data about you, and as such can and will be mined by Google to profile you or to sell it.

      Am I risking too much if I use it as the corporate contact point that it is? Am I just letting my white/straight/cis/male privilege show through?

      Nobody can tell you this, because risk in this context is purely a subjective estimation, and you are free to do what you please. However, I do care about my privacy, which means that I want to minimize the amount of data about me available for sale or to others in general. For me the motivation is quite simple, while I do block ads everywhere too and I generally don't have an impact in terms of getting personalized ads, once the data is collected I have no idea what will be used for, by whom and for what purpose. It doesn't even matter if the data actually allows to infer accurate things about me, it's enough that someone (e.g., insurance company, employer, bank, government, etc.) is gullible enough to believe that inference is correct. In the book "Privacy is power" (written by Carissa Veliz) she also develops a very interesting argument about the fact that violating your privacy usually means also violating the privacy of the people near you (the people with whom you share demographic, the people you communicate with etc.). This could be another point of view to consider.

      Anyway, if for you the above is fine, there is no other significant risk you are taking, and you should keep using Gmail if that suits you.

      A technical note. Secure email providers generally can have technical controls (i.e., encryption) to protect the body (content) of the email, and in some cases some small amount of metadata (e.g., Tuta encrypts also the subject). Generally though, you are still trusting the provider to perform that encryption (especially because a mail from Gmail -> Proton/Tuta would be encrypted by Proton/Tuta) and to not use metadata for any purpose besides delivering the emails. So privacy here doesn't mean absolutely removing the data from a third party, but it means giving it to a third party who uses it (due to contractual obligation, business incentives etc.) only for the intended purpose in a privacy-preserving way.

    • I mean yeah I think the main problem is just Google having all that data about you and potentially selling it to others whether that be for advertising, robocalling, or other things. So it really just comes down to how comfortable you are allowing Google to be able to use your emails and communications from corporations to see what things you like. Only time it really matters more is if you are using email for more personal or secure communications which yeah I would always prefer using better encrypted more messaging focused apps like signal for or just talking in person when possible.

  • Well this is certainly one of the decisions of all time. I guess we finally got our reaction from the board. I was waiting, hoping to hear some rebuke of Yenโ€™s bullshit. Didnโ€™t expect another intentional step into shit. Bye Felicia.

  • From the statement on their webpage: " We believe in people before profits, and our primary shareholder is the non-profitย Proton Foundationย whose mission is to fight for an open internet that promotes freedom of speech and freedom of information."

  • I wonder if Andy was watching fuckface destroy Unity, and just thought to himself, What could I say or do to aggressively power-fuck the Proton brand?

  • That doesn't take lot ressource for communication on both social network.

    • I'll take a guess that they are going back to Reddit so they can control what gets posted and shown to others. They got railed on Mastodon following the drama, which is probably why they're leaving.

    • It depends how they are doing it.

      People learned years ago that there is a big difference between microblogs (twitter), blogs (facebook and tumblr), and message boards (reddit). And there are major differences even within those. The post you make for tumblr and the post you make for facebook are targeting very different audiences. Which IS time consuming for a good community manager and is shitty 100 character blog posts for someone's nephew.

      From checking out their bluesky, it looks like proton is pulling out of all the microblogs in favor of just reddit (https://bsky.app/profile/proton.me). Which sucks but is "fine". And it is likely more that positive engagement on Mastodon was just too low to even be worth multi-posting once every two weeks. Which.. is something a lot of not shitty companies have decided to be the case.

      That said: I didn't check twitter because fuck that shit. If they are still super active there then, yeah, ridiculously "sus".

      • It's kinda weird though. Mastodon can have a pretty high character limit, on par with a reddit comment length.

        The instance my author account is on has it set to a much higher limit. Enough so that I can post a short story in two, maybe three sections.

        If it's the lowest possible character limit that's the problem, they could definitely get around that with damn near zero effort.

        Which is whatever, I get that streamlining social media reduces time costs, I'm more questioning the one they chose in terms of how much upkeep it'll be compared to other options. Reddit is going to have a lot more bullshit to wade through.

      • Thank i didn't see from this perspective. On mastodon the character limit is very small so i didn't understand how difficult it could be as i would do the same communication everywhere to stay consistent.

        In my opinion, they wanted to avoid the backfire from their ceo supporting Trump.

234 comments