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.
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 > :::
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.
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