Ok, so I just read upon Proton AG, the company behind Proton, and they don’t seem to owe investors money, because it was originally crowdfunded and now it finances itself with subscriptions. That sounds great! It is quite different to surveillance capitalism and enshittification (given that enshittification requires advertisers).
I am not advertising for Proton, by the way. To make that clear, I still wouldn’t use them because they seem to have very limited VPN functionality in their Linux clients. As a Linux user, I wouldn’t want that. However, if they fix that in the future, I could consider switching.
Edit: Similarly, I found this website https://www.ethicalconsumer.org/company-profile/tutao-gmbh summarizing its evaluation of Tutanota as ethical. It takes into consideration its ownership structure. Unfortunately, I cannot find details because there is a paywall for the information, but it could be the case that Tutanota does not owe money to investors and therefore is not seeking to maximize profits but rather provide a good service while compensating fairly its workers. I wish I could have more evidence.
I like that, if I only need mail with 20gb of storage, Tutanota is cheaper.
I don’t know what to do. I’ll have to think a bit longer.
can’t it be democratic and hierarchical?
does one exclude the other?
That’s not what OP said, they’re asking for two different metrics without any implication about dependency.
Proton is no hero.
Edit: Because of their aggressive monetization, not a bad product I just susoect it will keep getting more expensive.
Hence my question :) If there are investors waiting for returns, you bet (and, like, actually, you do in fact bet) they will get more expensive. If it’s a social enterprise, I wouldn’t worry as much.
Why?
I think prolly because of this https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/business/protonmail-scandal-tarnishes-swiss-privacy-reputation-/46952640
ProtonMail also guaranteed that “by default” it would not store any IP addresses that could be linked to users’ email accounts.
They don’t store IP addresses by default but when required to by law, they don’t have a choice just like any other company would.
Bad OPSEC by the activist, Protons hands were tied
This has been argued over for a long time now. They routinely fight against orders from foreign governments (foreign to Switzerland). When one case comes along and the Swiss government actually says they need the information, and the courts say Proton has to abide, they finally do. This somehow negates every other time the government has come knocking and been told to fuck off? They tried, the courts said they had to do it, so they did. If they didn’t, the service would be gone now.
