Proton launches privacy-first alternative to Excel and Google Sheets
> Swiss company Proton is further expanding its productivity suite. In addition to an email service, calendar, VPN, password manager, and drive, Proton Sheets is now available. It is an alternative to Microsoft Excel and Google Sheets, an increasingly important advantage as countries take sovereignty more seriously.
Yeah, I guess it depends on how you look at it and what are your limits on this stuff. I can see why you disagree even with me for sure.
It definitely didn’t look great. It certainly didn’t inspire confidence. Not bad enough for me to leave (once the head cooled), but enough for me to consider it if a competitor comes up with a similar offering (looking at Tuta Drive once they introduce it).
It was enough to get me to unsubscribe and move to tuta for email, pcloud for storage, and mullvad for VPN. I still have a free proton account but they will need to really regain my trust to get me to resubscribe.
Regardless of the walkback, it takes a real egghead to ‘accidentally’ praise an obviously corrupt fascist. Even from the narrow perspective of ‘what is best for their business’ it was moronic. You really think the guy in bed with Peter Theil, Palantir, Musk, etc etc and loves dictators who “rule with an iron fist” is somehow good for your privacy company and your users?
The statement revealed this dude as either at worst a fascist or at best a dipshit. Neither option is great for CEO of a company that requires very high trust from its users. Do I want to rely on and pay for products from the company he oversees? No not really.
I’m in a similar boat. I had Proton Unlimited because of a good deal they had, downgraded back to Mail Plus and got Mullvad for VPN (which looks to me better than Proton).
The thing about Proton is they make it easy to degoogle. I can easily set up gmail stuff to be forwarded for things I didn’t switch yet (or people who didn’t catch on the fact I changed emails) and they have a whole suite of products.
But really, if Tuta introduces a Drive on feature parity, I will consider a switch - though it will be pain to change everything again.
“Great pick by [Donald Trump]. 10 years ago, Republicans were the party of big business and Dems stood for the little guys, but today the tables have completely turned.”
- Andy Yen, Proton CEO
“Until corporate Dems are thrown out, the reality is that Republicans remain more likely to tackle Big Tech abuses.”
- Proton
Proton Mail has long positioned itself as an apolitical company, dedicated solely to safeguarding user privacy. That’s why many were surprised when CEO Andy Yen posted on X (formerly Twitter) that the political landscape in the U.S. had shifted, stating, “10 years ago, Republicans were the party of big business and Dems stood for the little guys, but today the tables have completely turned.”
This was earlier this year. So sure its up to interpretation.
I recall him saying he was not american so it doesnt matter what he said. Which annoyed me cause then why open mouth?
That being said its more than understand the ceo is not the only voice in company and it was January 2025 so I may have outdated information if this stance is even relevant.
That quote was the crux of it. IMO Yen was foolishly only looking at the situation through the lens of which party would be less of a barrier to Proton’s business and interests in user privacy. But the community very harshly (and rightfully so IMO) corrected him with regards to the bigger picture of corruption and cronyism and greed rampant in today’s GOP and how shortsighted out would be to trust them.
Proton as an org was pretty burned and officially walked it back and said they would refrain from allowing individual staff (CEO included) from making those kind of political statements that could be interpreted as representing the business.
They’re increasingly divisive I’d say. For me the fact that they rage-quit mastodon after a stint of bad publicity is all I need to know. If they were truly dedicated to a better internet they would be committed to stand up against big tech everywhere, not just wherever there’s money to be made on it. I’m migrating away from my proton mail account.
I get my VPN from Surfshark. Not because I necessarily trust them, but because it’s cheap and they don’t insist on doing anything else than just being my VPN provider.
Don’t let me ruin your good time, but my experience with Surf shark:
Used surf shark for about 3 years around pandemic timeframe. Had no complaints (other than it drained my phone battery super fast - didn’t test empirically, but seemed somewhat worse than other VPN providers). I was unemployed for a while, so took the opportunity to cut expenses; tried to drop my surf shark subscription. It was a HUGE pain in the butt. I forget the process, but iirc, you had to use their help chat to get the number for cancellations, they kept me on hold for ~10 min, then had a long winded questionnaire (“were required to ask you these questions before proceeding”) asking why I was quitting, then made an offer for discounted months before letting me unsubscribe.
Its my understanding regulations have changed such that that’s not allowed anymore and also that most VPN can elations are about that bad anyway, but still, wanted to share my experience. Lol, suppose so long as you never quit, you won’t have to deal with all that.
Ah, yeah, that sucks. In Europe you can always cancel by just not paying for a subscription, so I’ve rarely had experiences like this. Only time it happened to me was when I had been stupid enough to have a New York Times subscription (gah) and decided to end it. Huge pain in the ass.
With Surfshark I bought a two-year subscription without automatic renewal, so I get what I paid for and then it’s done. But I’m sorry to hear about their bad business practices—it goes well with the overall sleazy look of their website. Hopefully I’ll find something better by the time the subscription period is over. :)
Yeah, I had a boss once who’s favorite saying was:
“You don’t always get what you pay for But you never get what you don’t pay for”
Not any authoritative recommendations. I’m at most a casual user of VPNs, and so long as I see the traffic getting encrypted, don’t think about it much more.
I always hear Mullvad is great for maximizing privacy. Never tried them myself though.
Personally, I use Proton. I was prepping to jump ship earlier this year, but ultimately decided it wasn’t worth it. I’ve had a pretty decent experience with them. The only issue was on on a Linux machine…Uh…and it was minor enough and long ago enough that I don’t even remember what it was?
See above for my dissatisfying experience with Surf shark.
I did try to sign up with ExpressVPN many years ago. They’re payment portal was busted (tried every day for a week, emailed support with no response).
That about sums up my experience.
If you’re buying an annual plan, Mozilla resells Mullvad for cheaper. Monthly, buying direct is cheaper.
Also, I assume, but don’t have any evidence, that buying from a reseller is a little more private due to separation of billing and services.
If you use Mullvad you get a token instead of an account. It’s not linked to any email address. You can then pay directly to this token using crypto. You can even send cash in an envelope. If you use Tor to get a token and pay, you’re as private as can be.
The thing however is that VPN providers can always see what IP address is using their service. So however private your account and payment is, in the end you always have to trust the provider that they are not logging IPs.
If you are buying from Mozilla, then both Mozilla and Mullvad get access information. This means that buying from a reseller is less private by default.
Not the exact development route I wanted them to take, but def pleased they’re doing something to improve existing services.
Definitely better than the whole (ongoing?) Proton Wallet ordeal.
Proton Mail has long positioned itself as an apolitical company, dedicated solely to safeguarding user privacy. That’s why many were surprised when [Jan 2025] CEO Andy Yen posted on X (formerly Twitter) that the political landscape in the U.S. had shifted, stating, “10 years ago, Republicans were the party of big business and Dems stood for the little guys, but today the tables have completely turned.”
This statement quickly went viral, leading to further controversy when Proton’s official Reddit account reinforced Yen’s sentiment. The now-deleted post suggested that Republicans were more inclined to take on Big Tech monopolies than corporate-aligned Democrats. However, within hours, Proton removed all traces of these remarks from its social media platforms.
Proton? No.
People found AI config files in their public repos. When they were found, Proton deleted all discussion of it and then altered the repository history to pretend the config files were never there.
Shady, scummy behavior. They’ve tried to do the same ‘delete everything and ignore it’ when their CEO publicly praised Trump and the Republican party, and then kept doubling down in reddit and mastodon comments until someone on the PR team wrested the account away from him and started mass-deleting all of it.
> ::: spoiler Transcript > A post by [object Object] (@[email protected] [/u/[email protected]]) saying: > courtesy of @[email protected] [/u/[email protected]], Proton is now the only privacy vendor I know of that vibe codes its apps: > In the single most damning thing I can say about Proton in 2025, the Proton GitHub repository has a “cursorrules” file. They’re vibe-coding their public systems. Much secure! > I am once again begging anyone who will listen to get off of Proton as soon as reasonably possible, and to avoid their new (terrible) apps in any case. https://circumstances.run/@davidgerard/114961415946154957 [https://circumstances.run/@davidgerard/114961415946154957] > > It has a reply by the author saying: > in an unsurprising update for those familiar with how Proton operates, they silently rewrote their monorepo’s history to purge .cursor and hide that they were vibe coding: https://github.com/ProtonMail/WebClients/tree/2a5e2ad4db0c84f39050bf2353c944a96d38e07f [https://github.com/ProtonMail/WebClients/tree/2a5e2ad4db0c84f39050bf2353c944a96d38e07f] > > given the utter lack of communication from Proton on this, I can only guess they’ve extracted .cursor into an external repository and continue to use it out of sight of the public > :::
Is this a trustworthy analysis? I wanted to understand what happened. I am confused after reading this a while back, but still seeing people actively saying he praised Trump. I do what to know exactly what happened in the end to make a judgement.
I’m so, so tired of seeing that fucking article by ‘ovenplayer’ over and over again. It’s not your fault, mind you, but damn do I wish that abomination would get erased from the internet.
It’s incredibly biased, missing a ton of information, and just frankly outright lies to frame the whole thing as positively towards Proton as possible, and completely skips mentioning Proton’s attempted cleanup job. Even worse, it pretends to sound neutral while doing all that to try and gaslight people into thinking it’s actually a full journalistic dive into the issue.
I’m like 90% sure it’s just Proton’s PR team creating an easy astroturf- an account that was made JUST to post that article, nothing else, created right at the same time as the Proton PR team started working on the whole issue?
The only reason it’s only 90% instead of 100% is because there’s a lot of proton apologists who think Proton supporting this shit is ‘blown out of proportion’ because they have no idea what they’re talking about, but feel personally attacked because someone isn’t supporting ‘their team.’
Unfortunately I haven’t seen one yet- I would like to, so I could provide it to people in situations like this, but none of them have e.g. the now-deleted doubling-down Yen did on the official account, or noting the ‘88’ in his usernames, or even most of the mastodon clusterfuck beyond ‘they left mastodon after backlash.’
I was there reading most of it, but unfortunately I didn’t think to save screenshots of any of it, which is why I know it all happened, but this was also several months ago and I couldn’t recite the exact timeline anymore.
The long and short of it that when Andy Yen posted that, it immediately blew up on mastodon and reddit- along with presumably twitter, but I have that DNS blocked, so I have no further insights to that one, and frankly there’s enough weirdos on there that I don’t even want to know how that went down.
Mastodon, to my knowledge, was fairly bog-standard and I think most of it is still there, because proton’s PR team couldn’t lean on anyone to get it all purged. I suspect that’s the real reason why they left mastodon. Most of their posts involved were edited to be a lot less concerning sounding, however.
Reddit, on the other hand, had (presumably) Yen posting on the Proton official account (example that WAS archived by a very smart person who clearly saw proton for who they were: archive.ph/quYyb - that post no longer exists) doubling down for a while before someone else clearly took the reigns and started trying to play damage control, at which point andy yen got on his own reddit account and kept doubling down on it, using a ton of really concerning buzzwords. I remember reading him complaining about ‘the woke’ being ‘triggered’ at one point and just being like ‘What the fuck am I even reading right now.’ All of that was also edited away or deleted, but you can still find user replies to him boggling at him using GOP language that are unedited in the reddit threads that weren’t nuked.
Also revealed during all this is that Andy Yen’s personal reddit account is ‘andy1011000’. For those of you that don’t know, 1011000 is binary for ‘88.’ As in, the very famous nazi dogwhistle. While you can argue it may have another meaning- and I’m sure people will- the simple fact of the matter is that announcing your support for an authoritarian fascist with an encoded nazi dogwhistle in your username is a bad look, especially if you categorically refuse to acknowledge or change it when it’s pointed out to you. I know several people born in 1988 who used to have 88 in their usernames who instantly and comprehensively ditched those usernames the very second they found out what it meant, but Yen still uses it to this day.
lemmy.zip/post/30061526 lemmy.zip/post/30250238
Decide for yourself. There are screenshots and web archives scattered across the comments.
I’m well aware of their CEO positions, but they have no impact on the security while using LLMs does. I understand people that stopped using Proton services because of any of their past actions, but until now nothing they did compromised the security of the products.
Will be interesting to see what their next annual independent security audit will say.
Everyone should expect companies to give up any information they have because no CEO will go to prison for you, but they can’t give what they don’t have. If you know of any company that will go to prison for me, let me know.
As far as the case of sharing an IP address, it was made under Swiss court order and IP logging was only enabled after the court order and for that specific account only. And Swiss law at the time required review under Swiss privacy law for order to be granted, which has very high bar to be granted. So I wouldn’t classify that as “happily”. The content itself was never shared since Proton doesn’t have access.
Their marketing is shady as fuck, their foundation structure is a joke (CEO of the for profit entity has a voting majority) and they do hide like little chidren at any public pushback (like leaving Mastodon after the whole Trump/republicans debacle), but so far nobody raised any issues with their cryptographic security and they passed every single independent security audit.
It would be fair to discourage people from using for any of the above bullshit, but security is not one of them and bullshit claims like that just hurt privacy advocacy and keeps people in the existing monopolies.
Why are we linking to articles with no sources rather than just the horse’s mouth?
I edited it to add the link, before you even replied to it.
The only “other sources” is the one OP included.
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