Proton's mission, funding sources, independence, and community are some of the reasons we're more resilient than other privacy-first companies.

Proton’s mission, funding sources, independence, and community are some of the reasons we’re more resilient than other privacy-first companies.

  • BertramDitore@lemmy.worldEnglish
    511·
    2 years ago

    I finally upgraded my free account on Black Friday, couldn’t be happier. I so appreciate this kind of transparency and candor.

    We are not billionaire subsidized, government subsidized, or even donation subsidized. Rather, we derive almost all of our revenues from selling services directly to users in a profitable way. Proton services are never going to be the cheapest, we’re not going to have flashy promotions, unlimited “lifetime” plans (unless it’s for charity), or offers that are too good to be true. Not just because it doesn’t suit us, but because it doesn’t suit the mission. Instead, we will charge a fair price that reflects our costs and can deliver long-term stability.

  • Zerfallen@lemmy.worldEnglish
    16·
    2 years ago

    I hope they might consider a Proton Photos, since Google Photos really holds me to Google Drive. And Proton AI for working with documents on Proton Drive.

  • suckmyspez@lemmy.worldEnglish
    10·
    2 years ago

    I like proton but I hate their Black Friday discounts. Why not just make the products fairly priced all year round? Why should we have to wait to get good value?

  • Mobilityfuture@lemmy.worldEnglish
    8·
    2 years ago

    I’m scared to use my Proton email address much because I’m worried it will get filled with Spam like my gmail address :-/

    • Confound4082@lemmy.mlEnglish
      24·
      2 years ago

      That’s what the email alias company that proon bought last year and rolled into subscriptions is for.

      Also, if you buy your own domain, which from cloudflare is like $10/year, you can turn on catchall and use anything@yourdomain and have it delivered. Then, if one of your anything addresses gets compromised, you just block all email going to there and move on.

    • CrayonRosary@lemmy.worldEnglish
      21·
      2 years ago

      People have given you some good ideas, but here’s another: DuckDuckGo has free email aliases. You generate a “duck” address and it’s just some random email address that gets forwarded to your real email address while also blocking any trackers in the emails. And you can easily turn off an alias if it becomes spammy.

      It’s free and you don’t even have to make an account of any kind. To “log in” to their web browser and use this feature, all they do is send you an email with a link to click to make sure own that target email address. Then you can generate unlimited aliases that get redirected to it. But it’s up to you to track which alias was given to which website.

      There’s also a master duck address that you make up manually. I guess that’s technically an account and that’s the one you “log in” with if you install the browser on another device. You don’t have to actually use their browser, and they even have a plugin for Firefox to generate the aliases.

      Not as easy as having your own domain and forwarding email going to any address to your real account, though. But it’s totally free.

  • PlexSheep@feddit.deEnglish
    71·
    2 years ago

    While good, a lot of features and services in proton are still half baked. I have ultimate.

  • asbestos@lemmy.worldEnglish
    5·
    2 years ago

    I’ve keep seeing amazing things regarding proton in recent years, I think I’m overdue for a switch

    • sheogorath@lemmy.worldEnglish
      5·
      2 years ago

      I did the switch. Even if there’s no PPP pricing for my region it’s quite alright. I’m planning to migrate my whole family to Proton in the near future. We already have our chats with Signal and one other last thing is for media backup. We’re still using a combination of Google Photos and OneDrive to save our photos. Are there any good privacy oriented data storage solutions? I’m also saving up money to spin up my own self-hosted solution.

      • zarenki@lemmy.mlEnglish
        5·
        2 years ago

        If you’re planning to subscribe to Proton Unlimited or Proton Family regardless, you might as well try Proton Drive. They try to be fairly privacy focused similar to Proton’s other products.

        Mega has a similar privacy-oriented design. Such that the server side shouldn’t have direct access to your unencrypted file data or its decryption keys.

        Still, any web-based service necessitates trusting the JavaScript you receive not to leak out your password or keys. Both Proton and Mega have a good track record so far in that regard, but the best practice for privacy with raw data storage is to encrypt your own data with local tools and treat any remote server as untrusted.

        • CrayonRosary@lemmy.worldEnglish
          1·
          2 years ago

          I could imagine a tool that makes cloud storage act like a remote hard drive, with sectors and everything. Where these “sectors” are just small binary files.

          You have software locally that is setup to track local files and calculate how they are mapped to the remote sectors. When a file gets updated, or new ones are added, it shuffles things around in an efficient manner to keep the number of remote updates to a minimum, and then it only updates or adds the required sector files. This way a tiny edit to a 4 GB local file would only require a tiny upload to the server instead of resending a new encrypted copy of the entire 4 GB file.

          Not only are the little sector files all encrypted with a private key known only to you, the file structure in this system doesn’t even make any sense to anyone but you.

          However, if you lose you home PC and the file structure DB, the cloud copy becomes absolutely useless. Even if you had a backup of the private key.

          Something like this surely already exists. Maybe there are even cloud storage providers who offer hard-drive like access to a block of data instead of being file-based.

          EDIT: Turns out that’s what Proton Drive does. Kind of.

          End-to-end encryption for large files

          Proton Drive’s unique technology enables high-performance, client-side end-to-end encryption with large files by splitting large files into 4 MB chunks. Each chunk is signed with a hash to prevent removal or reordering. When you open or download a file, our file transfer and decryption algorithms ensure your data is rebuilt quickly in the correct order.

          They say it’s client side, but the hashes that control the ordering must be stored on the server or else you couldn’t easily download the file on a other device. And I wonder if it’s still efficient if you make an exit in the middle of the file. Does it need to send the full 4GB all over again? Even having to send 2 GB all over again would be a lot.

      • Lazhward@lemmy.worldEnglish
        2·
        2 years ago

        Proton includes cloud storage and recently started supporting automatic backup of pictures on your phone.

      • NarrativeBear@lemmy.worldEnglish
        1·
        2 years ago

        Mega was my option for family photo storage. Mainly used for instant upload to a shared folder between all of us.

        As an added step, with some automations, my NAS server (TrueNAS) would sync my mega photo album to my local Nas storage. Files older than two years would be purged from mega and archives on my home NAS would stay intact.

        Since then though I swapped mega out with my own personal self hosted nextcloud instance.

  • pathief@lemmy.worldEnglish
    5·
    2 years ago

    I love Proton and what they stand for but their Linux support is unfortunately quite bad. Everything feels half baked, at most.