Manifestos, Fear, and 'Loser Thinking': Inside Proton's AI Reckoning
404media.coI no longer trust Proton after reading this. Chen seems like he has lost what the entire point of Protonmail was supposed to be, and now wants to become one of the Big Tech companies they were built to be an alternative to. He also seems like a two-faced bully.
Email (and VPN, password manager, etc.) is far too sensitive to go as all-in as they want to do on AI. I've been using Tuta in parallel with Proton, and I will probably migrate over completely soon
Exactly. I mean, my proton accounts being taken over won't be catastrophic for me, but the whole premise of having them is they are secure enough for the case where it would be. This is not the place to jump head-first into the latest fad. I want them to be as slow and deliberate and conservative as possible. Experiment on something else, "secure email" shouldn't be it. I'm not anti-AI zealot in the least, but this clearly shows under-appreciation of the risks and complexities of using AI in engineering.
> I no longer trust Proton after reading this
You should've stopped trusting them the moment it came out that the CEO was a T---p supporter, or at the very least, someone who plays politics, on Xitter of all platforms. Like, if they really cared about privacy and security and all that jazz, he shouldn't even be on that shitty platform in the first place, let alone tagging and sharing T---p's posts. That alone tells you the kind of person he is - would you trust a corporation run by that person?
It was only a matter of time their products turned to shit.
Replying here so it's close to the top (sorry):
What do people recommend as truly good alternatives? Particularly non-American ones due to Snowden's revelations etc. etc.
I use Fastmail which has been a very boring and high quality product. The company is not American, it is Australian, but any country with close ties to the US probably offers little in the way of surveillance avoidance.
It's best to think of email as fully public information anyway, use Signal for anything you care about.
I switched from Gmail to Fastmail over a decade ago now, and it has been fantastic. IMO it is one of the highest quality software products in the world. I know that's a bold claim. But from a user's perspective: it's blazing fast, the UX is excellent, the web interface works flawlessly on every device and browser, and I have not run into a single bug.
It's just email! Works perfectly boringly.
The very first thing is that you need to own your domain. Once your email is, say, alex@gieg.com, then you can switch provider whenever you want and nobody has to know.
Back to your question, I'm a happy user of Migadu.
Mailbox.org and Tuta are generally recommended[1] as email service alternatives.
1: https://www.privacyguides.org/en/email/#recommended-provider...
I migrated from Gmail to Proton a few years ago which already took a large toll on my energy and mental capacity.
I get the feeling that in a few years even the options you suggested will have some sort of downside as well.
Doing a migration dance every few years is getting tiring and unsustainable for me.
Running my own mail server is going to be a losing race to keep me out of spam filters (which you tend find out after you discover that your mails are silently being dropped)
Honestly perhaps we should just migrate from e-mail altogether. The question is to what instead?
Unfortunately, the general trend for enshittification pretty much ensures the vicious cycle. Something becomes good, then it becomes popular, then people bring money to it, then money managers get hired to manage money, then they notice money flows can be optimized, then the enshittification begins, and very soon people need to migrate to something else. Happens all around us, not only with emails.
I just migrated from Proton to Mailbox.
The mail server works great so far and their plans are super generous. Their web client is kinda shit and no mobile apps but any IMAP client will do the job fine.
Mullvad for VPN.
Are either of them a non-profit?
Thanks!
Mythic beasts, https://www.mythic-beasts.com/hosting
I'm very happy with Migadu, although they just offer mail, nothing more.
Migadu
Who's Chen? Do you mean Yen?
almost like he's a ... CEO. sigh
> “Due to insufficient velocity,” Proton is not on track to achieve its annual recurring revenue target by the end of the year
I'm a Proton customer and other than some UX improvements I'm not missing any big features. This idea they need more velocity is a failure in management.
Yeah chasing velocity like that is for startups. Proton already has a product, a competent team, and (had) a lot of soft capital in the form of a good trusted name and goodwill.
That's enough momentum to coast on for a very long time, especially since their whole deal is that they're owned by a nonprofit and don't even have shareholders to pressure them.
They really had to nothing and they'd won, the only way to lose in a situation like that is... exactly this. Andy could have probably just sat on his ass for 20 years like Gabe Newell and probably been able to buy a similar yacht at the end of it.
> and (had) a lot of soft capital in the form of a good trusted name and goodwill
"had" is the right word.
A lot of small company founders desperately crave this one very specific LinkedIn post where they announce a Series C or whatever and have this typical photo in which the cofounders (wearing untucked oxford/dress shirts) stand between two billionaire LPs (wearing blazers).
Entrepreneurship isn't about building a company or even making money anymore, it's about the prestige of announcing that you either got into a selective incubator or that you raised. Minds corrupted by the panopticon.
This. I don't want some huge "business productivity suite", or whatever other crap they've been building lately. I paid initially Proton for secure email that wasn't being mined for adds. Now they have chatbots and who knows what else in the works, and are simply trying to chase revenue. Pass.
Opposite, I wish there existed non FAANG, non Cloud Act suite with video calls, VPN, object storage. Even if it would probably compromise privacy in different ways, it would be good at least for diversification. Proton does it to a certain extend. Secure email alone is not such a big problem, you'll easily find 5-6 cheap solid providers based in Europe.
Zoho offers a lot of good stuff in their platform.
I run my business on Proton and we do miss some things. But they’ve been doing a good job making things happen slowly but surely, and I can be patient.
What I can’t tolerate is if they stop putting security first, which it sounds like they are under Yen’s leadership.
The CEO posted in a company chat that pentesting newly written code before pushing it live is "bullshit and loser thinking".
Sounds so juvenile, worse than a teenager. Unfit for running a company dealing with secure mail.
It's almost something you would see on Silicon Valley:
The new upstart CEO taking on Hooli and making those comments ("bullshit and loser thinking")
Gavin Belson get's wind of it and out of fear implements their new AI policy: "Straight to Ship". Anything the engineers can think of just gets generated and immediately deployed with auto-marketing (with obvious humorous results).
I'd rather hear that than passive aggressive & vague HR speak. Sounds like a fun company to work at actually.
I'm often baffled by the current trend of leaders/employees at a company acting completely unprofessionally and seeing a social media reaction like "sure they're acting like an asshole for no clear reason but TBH I'd rather see that than a customer service/HR drone politely following a script!".
Mostly because it's tends to be really obvious a company/individual is still deliberately cultivating a specific image, just with a different spin/target demographic than the stereotypically sterile, formal variant of corporate PR. But so many people eat it up.
In this case, doing a garden variety Elon-wannabe persona that's currently in vogue among the SV founder set. It's a really uncreative, lazy move for leaders doing cargo cult management. And cringe-y in general to imagine working for someone who unironically resembles the most over the top satire of tech leaders on HBO's Silicon Valley.
you're making a broad judgement call off of a very narrow selection.
We've had 15+ years of hyper HR cancel culture espoused by Simon Sinek, Linked In and so on.
Perhaps this is just reversion to the mean?
One of my first bosses would throw keyboards at me and cuss me out nearly every hour. One of my favorites, in hindsight. Great guy. Just passionate, and overworked.
Learn not to jump to conclusions.
Half the direct quotes from Yen in the article sound exactly like AI/growth hacking posts from current day LinkedIn. Sure, you can't generalize from that alone but I'm not seeing anything unique or interesting from this sample to root for, just more of the same 2026 flavor of insufferable corporatese.
it's a mind virus and we all use them. nothing exceptional there
I mean, is that baffling in a world that elected Trump?
I'm assuming by "fun" you mean "I can probably get away with a lot".
More than a couple of people with that attitude at any workplace and it's definitely not fun for almost everyone else.
No .
Loser thinking.
If my CEO called me a loser for trying to enforce some level of quality, I would start looking for a new job immediately
Also, leak the conversation to help other job seekers avoid the place.
This really undermines trust in Proton, not just from a data privacy perspective, but also simply in terms of security and reliability. If they don't issue a statement proving that this is all just made up, or announcing that they're firing the CEO and restructuring the company, I'll switch to another provider in the long run.
Look. I just want an email provider that pays enough dues to the smtp mafia so my personal correspondence doesn't hit spam or bounce. Why. Why can't just email be straightforward and transactional.
Because straightforward and transactional doesn’t increase shareholder value.
Proton to 'Re-Interview' Staff About AI to See Who Gets to Keep Their Job ( https://www.404media.co/proton-to-re-interview-staff-about-a... ) 85 points | 3 days ago | 42 comments https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50251062
Where I work had a minor restructure and some employees had to re-interview, essentially to keep their own jobs. A colleague of mine said "well, if I have to go through the process of an interview again, I might as well also do it elsewhere". Makes perfect sense.
At least one of the re-interviewees did that, and got a better paying job elsewhere. Good on them! They had 10-odd years of valuable systems knowledge, and we able to solve some complex environment issues quickly because of this. They weren't unique, but they were rare.
This looks really bad. I would hate to work at a place with leadership and morale like that.
I guess I don't understand Proton's financial position. Are they not owned by the non-profit Proton Foundation? Why can they not just have slow and steady growth with an emphasis on security and quality?
Because they hired the wrong CEO for that?
The foundation has trustees, whose job is to ensure the goals of the foundation are being met, and they hire the CEO. In this case, one of the trustees is the CEO, which is a bit of a conflict of interest.
“Our legally binding purpose is to further the advancement of privacy, freedom, and democracy around the world. … We measure our return on investment not through financial metrics, but through impact.” (proton.me)
> His ultimate message for the team was to “stop lovingly handcrafting all our code and use AI more.”
What more is there to say?
The real kicker is that he sees any thorough human review of security critical code - even if that code is 100% AI generated - as "handcrafting code".
You just can't trust software being developed under such a man's leadership to be secure. It's a fatal mark against their raison d'etre.
> “Perception is more important than truth, the truth doesn’t matter if you don’t win on perception.”
Seeing this sentiment expressed by Proton's leadership may be enough for me to start transitioning away after eight years. Is Tuta a reasonable alternative to investigate first?
archived, full story: https://nonograph.com/manifestos-fear-and-loser-thinking-ins...
Can't imagine the company surviving if Andy is allowed to stay on as CEO. A company like Proton lives and dies by its reputation, trust, and goodwill. Given their mission and brand, this is spectacularly tone deaf and jeopardizes everything they've spent over a decade building up.
Only thing that might save their face is kicking Andy and following up with Japanese levels of corporate apologizing.
> A company like Proton lives and dies by its reputation, trust, and goodwill.
This is essentially what I wrote in the "reason for leaving" comment box when I cancelled my annual subscription. I'm sure many others have/will as well; I'm less sure Proton will course-correct before it's too late.
I won't be renewing unless and until Yen and Butler are removed.
Dude, all I want is a private and secure email provider. That’s it. That’s what I pay for.
Everything else - and I mean everything else - is ancillary to that core function. Seeing a CEO openly throw security out the window in favor of Big Tech’s latest drug addiction is bad enough, but the CEO of a company whose entire reputation is bucking Big Tech? Inexcusable.
Already looking for exit strategies. I don’t want to give this prick one red cent of my money.
> Already looking for exit strategies.
Leaving Proton has been in the back of my mind for a while, and this is probably the last straw for me. I've previously heard that Fastmail is good, but I'm interested in what others are doing. I agree with you that email privacy and security are top of the list. I don't care about a private AI feature (eg, Proton's Lumo), and I don't need their productivity suite (docs, sheets, meetings). Just do one thing really well.
Looking for others' input on the right way to offboard from Proton.
I have my own domain, so offboarding from Proton was pretty easy, just exported all my mail and then setup the new mail provider with my email and imported them all.
There are a number of email providers I looked at when switching. Ended up going with mailbox as I was more confident about privacy of a company in Germany than Australia and they were a bit cheaper. Posteo seems like a good option if you don't have your own domain. I also looked at Tuta, but their lack of import killed them as an option, I'm not signing up for a higher subscription level to get that feature.
Proton Mail, Proton VPN, and Proton Pass are the only products I’m using right now. Lumo and other suites feel subpar and inferior. I don’t know why they don’t collect feedback from users like us and put effort into what matters.
Internally, the Chen had a bad rep since years now and the overall mood in the company has always been toxic between employees.
Having aimed at emigration to Switzerland once I only made myself sure I don't want to live there. Attracts too many too ambitious types. Anyway, using Swiss services does not mean that you are renting a safe deposit in their bunker.
This is happening in so many companies - executives and cult-like technical leadership are still touting lines of code as being indicative of productivity while their engineering teams lose coherence around their products.
I'm very pro AI, but A) it constantly is trying to drive off the cliff, needs constant care, and B) the editorialized title is ascribing 100% of power to the CEO, which we already have counter-evidence for based on the employees responses.
Wow, I almost chose Proton for my de-google. That was close.
Well, they just lost me forever as a VPN customer.
Very funny to compare this with the posts just a few days ago [1] where they announced they were reinterviewing folks to lay then off if they weren't sufficiently on the AI train.
Almost like where there's smoke, there's fire.
> Yen said this is the last year that Proton will hire engineers at all, and instead only hire people to build things with AI.
Uh-oh, I need to look for a different email provider now.
Well, that makes me feel better about not migrating to proton recently. Dream was nice while the mask stayed on.
I was looking into moving to Proton just yesterday. I was leaning toward it over Tuta, but this completely kills it as an option for me.
I just want to pay someone and then get a reliable email service in reuturn. Why do we need all of this velocity, productivity BS.
Alternative VPN recommendations?
Mullvad. Best option on the market, and what I'm moving to
Problem with them is that their CEO finances far-right politics with the money you give him.
That's a deal breaker for me as well.
...and that's a dealbreaker for me
Mullvad doesn't let you forward ports.
AirVPN does. Happily using it for ~3 years now.
Heard of them, but I think it's fair to say their home page doesn't inspire a ton of confidence?
This expedited my decision to move away from Proton. I had stuck around because the Mail offering was ‘good enough’, but I don’t think it’s acceptable to have a security product infested with slop and developed carelessly. I am hoping Kagi’s email product comes sooner rather than, or I may just go to Fastmail.
"Yen was not happy that Proton was drawing attention to this limitation."
This has always been the case. Lack of transparency and dishonest, overzealous marketing.
I use Fastmail because they are at least honest about their limitations and Proton is completely overhyped in terms of the genuine privacy and security of their products. Good to know that beyond being mediocre they've confirmed it's all increasingly AI slop: "Ninety percent of code at Proton in October was written by AI"
Never trusted this company because of Andy, and never will.
As a Proton customer, this is disappointing to hear that it's like this, because I definitely got the sense that it's a company that would operate differently. It actually sounds (unfortunately) like the culture of a lot of the places I've worked...
On the other hand, I do see the situation their leadership is in, even though they're not handling it in a respectful way. If the company needs to provide competitive services vs. everyone else who is using AI, they're just going to get left behind. And even for security: like if their engineers are skeptical about adopting AI how can they protect their system in a world with Mythos and all other kinds of AI running around attacking them? I imagine their product would attract employees who are more skeptical about AI, which is hard to change . They need to find a balance between keeping with the spirit and principles of their product but not be in denial about the new world we live in.
> If the company needs to provide competitive services vs. everyone else who is using AI, they're just going to get left behind
Why not just build a damn good product that has a steady revenue stream? You don’t have to compete in a race to the bottom. There are other ways.
My email provider is boring. They do email and nothing else. Feature development is glacial but reliable. I doubt they’re rich. I doubt they’re tripling their ARR. But they have a stable business as best as I can tell and seem happy with it.
This whole “the only way to compete is to eat the world” is stupid and only makes things worse.
> And even for security: like if their engineers are skeptical about adopting AI how can they protect their system in a world with Mythos and all other kinds of AI running around attacking them
Rotfl there's even this idea that you need vibecoded crap to resist Mythos? Oh my freaking god.
AI is not the issue here. But when your business is based on security and privacy you better adopt it carefully and deliberately. If you're measuring your teams on how much AI they use, I don't trust that you're putting security front and center. AI can be used to improve security, but you can absolutely do the opposite if you push too hard.
Also, any time anything comes out it gives a clear impression that the leadership are bullies, from the CEO on down. That creates an environment in which people are afraid to speak up, which means issues get overlooked. Which isn't great for security either.
I would have absolutely no problem with a CEO setting a solid, well-founded direction about the use of AI to improve their products while keeping a foundation of security and privacy. But Yen just sounds like a Silicon Valley tokenmaxxing douchebag.
Well-put, I agree. This is basically why I cancelled my subscription yesterday, though regretfully I was in a hurry and didn't write it up in the comment field.
Another way of thinking about it is that it's really all these little bits together that make the situation seem so bleak. That level of aggressiveness regarding AI, the thing about not having enough velocity, the fact that it seems like a workplace where people are afraid to speak up--all that paints a picture that is basically the opposite of what I want out of the service. The whole brand, as I understood it, was that Proton was focused on security and privacy. I don't think the workplace described in that article really matches up to that brand.
Glad I hadn't really migrated mail to Proton yet, so now I can figure something else out. What's wild is a week ago I was actually thinking about expanding my subscription to their other products too.
I've just renewed my two year sub. Auto-renewal to be switched off imminently. This is terrible.
Well you could do a cc chargeback, but expect to lose all access immediately (even free-tier), so migrate everything off first.
alternative recommendations?
"[not having AI psychosis is] bullshit and loser thinking."
Seems like dhh has a new pupil
Im not anti AI, but I probably "don't use it right". Fine by me if it prevents this "AI psychosis". These people should be baker acted.
Not sure why the hell you'd trust Proton in the first place? What they sell is some loose guarantees slapped on a completely insecure protocol with many footguns lying around.
Now we know it's run by a dick too.
They sold fear. That was all.
Looks like a smear post, easy for anyone to do
Should wait for and read Proton response before taking it seriously
Portraying a subject unflatteringly does not automatically make an article a "smear".