Rawen's Musings

So make sure you don't kick it in the teeth. That’s how I’d describe the relatively recent blunder in the privacy-focused circles of the techno-sphere, especially in light of our present “napalm strike on humanity”. What am I rambling about you ask? Or maybe who? Well, if you’ve been at least slightly “kissed” (yes, we say that in my native language in this context) by the IT privacy and its movements, you’ve definitely heard about a “little” (those quotes should be huge) company from a small mountainous European country. The country of beautiful views, very high (but quite costly) quality of life and with an extremely long tradition of direct democracy. Yes, yes, I know, also “neutrality” (another set of quotes which should be larger). And the company is nobody else, drumroll please, Proton.

In case you have no idea who they are, their goal is essentially creating and providing a set of services similar to what Google does when it comes to email, calendar, personal cloud storage etc. One of the key missions of Proton in this field was providing the services with the emphasis of not making the customer the product (sounds familiar?). Another one of their missions was to fight any kind of privacy invasion and providing tool to get around oppressive network overwatch. I’m sure the name Proton VPN has at least once flown around your ears or eyes. With the rise of password managers (because the password rotation thing is rather detrimental to security given the human factor) they even provided their own (and pretty good one too). The price for this quite competent developer in the field was of course the services weren’t 100% free but there’s of course free tier available.

But then came the warning signs. First, Proton Scribe, the AI-assisted writing tool for their email. This already raised quite a few eyebrows, especially considering the general disdain towards the wasteful use of “AI” (yet another set of quotes that should be the size of this entire page). The small silver lining of this addition however is: it’s opt-in which is, in my opinion, the correct approach for features like this and it was by default delegated to run locally on your device thus reducing the possibility of leaking any data. How true is that given recent climate is a decision I’ll leave for the reader but you can probably already guess my assessment.

Second warning sign, Proton Wallet. One could say, crypto and privacy together makes sense, right? Ehh, depends. If by crypto you mean cryptography then absolutely. Because, you know, it’s kind of hard to have privacy without encryption in cyberspace. But in this case we mean crypto-”currencies”. Yet another thing that’s as liked as expired century eggs among the major customer base of Proton. And yet there was another small bit of silver lining added which is the possibility to expand into handling the usual currencies, essentially making it an equivalent of Google Wallet. Of course that carries its own legal challenges but it’s an interesting prospect nonetheless

But then came the “main course”. And by main course I mean an act of carpet bombing your “fields of trust” with 10 different kinds of napalm. Because let’s be completely honest; how in the world could you trust your privacy to someone who has the guts to praise an act of the very people that you claim you protect your customers from? That’s right you couldn’t. Like, I’m not going to judge the person that was endorsed for I don’t know their competences at all (though considering that the entire gaggle there has about as much competence as a Soviet politburo I wouldn’t have high hopes). But directly praising their superior (as in position in the hierarchy), yeah, that’s too much.

Now, you could say that this was a personal thing, right? Well, no. Why? It was through official communication channels. The said person also tried “explaining” (seriously, how many quotes am I going to type here) their stance … as in digging their heels in while adding some not-so-subtle dogwhistles. And no, birthyear isn’t a great excuse considering their account for that matter was rather recently made. It could’ve been considered if it was an old account before this act. Like, I used to have 911 in my nicknames when I needed a number because I like the sportscar associated with it.

So, did anyone else from the company step in to try and clean-up the mess? Well, they did. And they did piss-poor job at that. Because if you read their non-apology (I’ve seen one too many like this, not to mention I work in a reasonably large company that has to be “diplomatic” in its communication), their reasoning is that it was a mistake in internal communication. Let me say it again, it was a mistake in internal communication. So, are you telling me that you’re very much in support of said person’s views but you weren’t supposed so say it out loud? Have you seriously stooped so low that you’ve merely weaponised the “noble goal” to suit your needs?

So yeah, dear Proton. You fucked up. You fucked up hard. You took whatever trust you earned, broke its feet and showed a rusty nail up its backside. Can you save yourself? Maybe, if you want to. But I’m afraid you actually don’t. So, “Congratulations” (there aren’t quotes big enough), you’ve become the very thing you claim you fight against.

R.R.A.