When you know your boss’s brand even outside of his office. Short, shallow gags.

He thought it was funny.

Proton is marketing to tens of millions of people and customers who have no intention of breaking any law, but want some assurance of privacy when laws are changed or ignored by whoever is currently in charge of whatever country. Choosing Proton as your provider because you want to privately break the law with their tools is not the same thing, or even relevant.

They sell their service as privacy-first across a suite of tools, but they don’t explicitly define the limitations. Now that I’m looking they lean in on the whole Swiss thing being a reason their privacy is so private. So if anything they are advertising that the Swiss government is hard to convince to share information with foreign authorities (they weren’t).

This is exactly the kind of bullshit marketing that I’m getting at. Proton AG could be upfront the limitations of that privacy, or how an account should be created to be compatible with the expectation they are creating, or disclose when they’re being asked for information, by whom, or a whole raft of choices. They could choose to be loud about it all, but they are only loud about the marketing and silent on their compliance activity.

As an aside I’m also wary of these goofy org structures of non-profit owned by for-profit companies. It’s the same kind of assumptions-based marketing at play where non-profit sounds nicer than big evil money hungry corpo. But it’s actually just a way to shelter money from tax, or access the Swiss Finance system in a way that enables the company to hide they want to hide.

Thanks, I’ve only been following the drama from Lemmy posts. So I’m wondering though, reading about Proton AG on Wikipedia I see they opened up their cloth to the Swiss government with user information, and it ended up getting a customer, who was an activist in Atlanta, arrested by the FBI. Fucking amazing for a company that screams privacy first about everything.

Why isn’t that incident enough for everyone to drop them? The koolaid-soaked middle manager posting on Rddt defending their corpo’s AI policy is icing on a cake already made of shit. Did he make a post defending the asterisk “privacy first” should have in their marketing?