Drive - Selfhosted Nextcloud

Email - Posteo/Tuta

VPN - Cryptostorm (IVPN/Mullvad are more user friendly)

Passwords - Keepass (Sync over my Nextcloud.)

Well, I'd say Proton is still better than most other options (open-source software, no ad trackers on the website and in apps). However, specifically for VPNs, I would recommend Mullvad or IVPN. If you are a bit more tech-savvy, you may also take a look at Cryptostorm. Of all three, only Mullvad is police-raid-proven to not store logs or other PII. The most important thing for me personally would be that the VPN company is not owned by a larger parent company, which in turn owns multiple different VPN providers. This alone excludes a lot of the heavily advertised providers (Private Internet Access, NordVPN, Surfshark, ExpressVPN, CyberGhost, OVPN, and probably a few more).

Mostly true, that's why I opened with "I wouldn’t call it writing on the wall." But for me, it shows that they are not as privacy- and consumer-focused as they like to present themselves. Supporting Trump is just five steps further in this direction. (That's just how I feel about it.)

I wouldn't call it "writing on the wall," but they have done some not-so-good things over the last few years:

1. Handing over data for their email services (which was legally required) (ref).
2. Releasing a Bitcoin wallet. The problem for me is that Bitcoin is inherently not private.
3. Lying in marketing. Proton claims "no data or speed limits" for their free VPN (ref), which is just plain wrong. If you download a few gigs, it will slow you down to a few Mbit (if I remember correctly). I even contacted their support about this, and they just said, "They are balancing the servers for the free VPN." But then why was it fast in the beginning, and if I reconnected to the same server, would it be fast again. Just to be clear: I have no problem with the speed limit/balancing itself, just that they are lying about it.
4. Proton incentivizing free email accounts to connect to a Gmail account to get 500 MB more storage. (You need to go through the "tutorial" steps to get the 500 MB extra, and one of them is to have a Google Mail account send all their emails to your new Proton inbox.)

This is why I personally decided against Proton.

Already in Europe and that is what I did. (See comment with mail below)

Oh, nice! Thanks for pointing that out, I never noticed it before. Since I’m already using KeePass, that will be the way to go for me.

Thanks for the explanation and I was just starting to look into them myself and I have to say, they look good, simple and private. Any recommendation for an local 2FA App with automatic local backups? Currently looking at Aegis

Never took the time to properly set it up and look at it. :/ And at least with the 2FA Apps I want to properly understand them before using them, but you are probably correct.

tbf I didn't look, but I would be surprised if that worked.

I just wrote a nice mail to their privacy inbox :D :

"I hereby request the deletion of the GitHub account "Xamrica" and all associated data connected to this email address ("my@mail.com") based on GDPR Art. 17, and a confirmation of the successful deletion (Art. 19).

If any data is still retained after the initial deletion, I also request a list of all remaining data, the legal basis for its retention, and the expected deletion date based on GDPR Art. 15.

Furthermore, I would like to request confirmation of any future data deletions from the data list mentioned above, unless you can prove that it "involves disproportionate effort" (GDPR Art. 19).

Thank you."

Maybe take a look at selfhost.de. The Website is completely in German but they have a free tier and their privacy policy also looks good. I used the paid version for 10+ years and never had any problems.

If you are one of the first 20.000 users of kagi, you will get a code and I just got mine per Mail. Let me know if it worked :D

https://lemm.ee/instances ../instances also works for any other instance you might want to check out.

For context: They edited their anwser and said the old one was bad. https://kagifeedback.org/d/2808-reconsider-your-partnership-with-brave

For context: They edited their anwser and said the old one was bad. https://kagifeedback.org/d/2808-reconsider-your-partnership-with-brave

Consent-O-Matic https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/consent-o-matic/