Andy Yen’s values are incompatible with Proton’s mission. He advocates for poor security practices, supports fascists, and he verbally abuses his subordinates. As such, I can no longer in good conscience continue to financially support a company with such terrible leadership.
Unfortunately for me, my subscription just renewed last month on a multi year plan, but it does give me time to browse for and experiment with alternatives.
If you’re able, I encourage you to do the same and cite Andy Yen as the driving factor for your decision. We can’t let these tech bro fascists destroy what little semblance of privacy we have left.
I use Fastmail now. I know it doesn’t have the encryption that Protonmail has (what does, aside from Tuta anyway?), but the alias feature is great and integrates directly with 1Password (my PW manager). I chose 1P due to a blog post by Troy whatshisname a few years back and have been happy with it since. I have 15 days left on my Mullvad VPN sub, and I honestly don’t know what I’ll switch to once that’s over (since apparently that CEO is a fascist too).
It certainly is bleak out there. I self-host quite a few services, and I used to roll my own VPN, so I might just do that again.
Heyyy, sorry to bring more bad news. But 1Password is also a fascist company. They donated money to DHH through Omarchy, and the CEO is already known for not being cool.
It’s a shame, because I liked the keyboard navigation on their password manager.
Fuuuuck. This is exhausting. I was already salty about having to move my VPN but changing password managers means migrating my family too. So annoying. Any recs for ethical and good VPN and PW management?
Sadly I’m still looking for alternatives on the VPN front.
As a password manager I use KeePassXC and keep the password file synced between computers using rsync. But the KeePassXC dev is also vibe coding parts of it now, and I’ve heard the same about the rsync dev. I’d still rather stay on vibe coded software instead of vibe coded and fascist supporting software, but I’m looking for alternatives.
My recommendation is that you stop doing that.
The tools you’re using to stay private and secure online need to be chosen for functionality first and foremost. Do not be driven away from effective tools by controversy.
There is no ethical consumption under capitalism.
JFC. That one will take longer to switch away from.
Get something offline-by-default like KeePass, and then if you want to you can backup/sync the database file with whatever cloud storage provider of your choosing
I’ve tried that before (KeepassXC) and the lack of convenience is not worth the added security to me. I totally understand why people would make that choice though.