Three things on Proton:
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Proton mail has been in a rampage with sponsor YouTube channels and, in my opinion, that is a mistake. I would have kept it an organic growth, but that is me… a nobody, and Proton has become far more successful than no other email provider in the privacy world.
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Considering even that, Proton is not vetting who is sponsoring. This is a fiasco. For instance they try to sponsor the channel “The hated one” that never takes any sponsors and even constantly criticizes channels that does it. That is a mayor blunder for Proton, there is no scrutiny at all with their marketing deployment. By the way, we learned that that youtubers get a juicy amount by Proton in these sponsorships (I think was $70 per subscription).
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Proton, for years, has been aiming for the masses, not the most serious in privacy (for instance, androidś Proton email still uses Google push services). That is not bad per se, I still recommend Proton to many. But those with a more ideological approach to privacy or those requiring top notch on it, should be aiming for other service providers.
Honeypot behavior, don’t you think? We are suppose to be trusting them, but this is what they do?
controlled opposition
’
Considering what the Proton guy has said about MAGA I imagine these are on purpose.
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They also sponsor a far-right influencer in Brazil.
This guy is literally a grandson of a dictator of the military dictatorship. He was also one of the articulators of the 2023 coup attempt, pressing the military to join
very cool proton
edit: giving more context in case someone wants to post this in their subreddit (I won’t): his name is Paulo Figueiredo and he still have a proton vpn sponsor link in every video on youtube.
I’m from Brazil and I hadn’t seen this yet. It’s disgusting! Dude, Proton never again! They are financing the most rotten things in Brazil! Very sad and revolting!
Ironically I am happier with cock.li than proton
(context: owned by 4chan user (with a grain of salt(?)) but it’s best i’ve found :/ )
Edit: I don’t use it much anymore, profile lurkerers.
I was afraid Proton would eventually go down the far right route… and it seems like my fears came true
their CEO publicly announced support for trump; anyone saying otherwise about proton’s proclivities is coping too hard – especially the ones in this community.
you can say this about literally every tech company these days.
Which is why we support Open Source like Firefox, Thunderbird, GIMP, NextCloud, LibreOffice and a whole lot more. :-)
With euro office coming up, there was some musing that libre office has Russian roots, does that change the equation any?
afaik euro-office is a fork of libreoffice that is redesigned to look more like onlyoffice
that or it’s a fork from onlyoffice
It’s Euro-Office that might have Russians roots. Do get the facts straight. ;-)
LibreOffice is the only real free and open, open source office suite out there.
Isn’t libre also a fork of open?
Yes… Because OpenOffice was truly free at the beginning, but then they wanted to make it more and more closed, and then people who didn’t share that mission went their separate way. Lucky for those os us, who like things to be as open as possible… And free… And I still pay for it - but I’m free to do that. I had a rough couple of years with low income and many expenses, but even then I could use it for free. That’s true freedom to me. I don’t want things to be free, like in the sense that I don’t want to pay. I do pay, I like to support things that makes sense to me, and with the amount that I can actually afford.
Man it took me 3 days of re-reading to only now realize that there is OPENoffice that is forked to libre office, and ONLYoffice, which has strong russian origins.
Til that only-office is even a thing. Far too easy to misread when I wasn’t expecting only as a prefix to office. I’m sure I’m not the only one that got tripped up.
Also PSA: euro office isn’t a standalone offline office suite - it’s web based and doesn’t run standalone. Needs next cloud and quite a bit of setup to allow for that M$365 ‘experience’.
deleted by creator
I’m so happy I moved away from them a year and something ago. This was totally predictable
Moved to what?
Proton did respond to this.
https://www.reddit.com/r/ProtonMail/comments/1u05xs2/comment/oqgihvq/
To avoid you all a trip to reddit:
You’re right to raise this, and we want to address it directly and provide you important context on how this happened.
Vincent Lapierre’s channel should never have been part of our affiliate and sponsorship program, because we intentionally avoid association with channels whose content could distract from our message and divide our community.
Proton operates globally, and while our services are available to everyone regardless of political views and our mission is consistent everywhere, our knowledge of every local media landscape is not. In this case, our team didn’t have enough context about the French space to make a well-informed decision, and that’s on us.
We also want to be straight about what a placement like this is and isn’t. An affiliate or sponsorship arrangement is a transactional placement for awareness, not an endorsement of a creator’s views. In the case of Vincent Lapierre, this was a single video sponsorship, not a partnership.
But that distinction doesn’t excuse what happened here. The responsibility to vet who we put our name next to is ours, and we didn’t meet it this time. We’re now reviewing our vetting process and our guidelines for our marketing agencies to ensure this doesn’t happen again.
If you see something like this again, tell us. We rely on your feedback and vigilance.
But have they cancelled the channel from being affilates and sponsored? I don’t see them directly stating that.
Such companies “sponsor” everyone. It’s cheaper than normal advertisements.
You’ve got some companies advertising with streamers/youtubers that do some checks on who they advertise with. They use specialised communication agencies, it’s their job.
It still means that my subscription fees are ending up in the pockets of a far right “influencer”. Fuck them for doing me dirty like that.
Ever heard of “Public Relations,” the thing 9 out of 9 companies live and die by?
