this post was submitted on 24 Jul 2024
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You know, people are mad at this for some reason, but while I don't see myself using this ever, I'm really glad a more privacy conscious alternative to the google ecosystem is growing.(Even if this product of theirs doesn't compete with them, many others do)
The reason people are mad with this is because Proton's longstanding services are lacking basic features for months and years already with no update in sight, and in less than a month after a (now) controversial poll, Proton introduces AI and crypto wallet in their portfolio.
Genuinely wondering, what features are you talking about? Proton has a page for voting for features, and I definitely see highly voted ones get added.
Linux client is the biggest one I'm waiting for, but AFAIK they've said it's planned, and I appreciate the support for Rclone in the meantime.
I could go on and on about those features on that page that are there for ages, but one struck me hard in the last hour: I tried cancelling my subscription, and after clicking on 6 "I'm sure" buttons and writing a reason why, I couldn't cancel because I was using too much storage (3GB, free accounts have a 500MB limit). I deleted everything on my Drive and emptied the trash, tried again, no success. Deleted all my emails and emptied the trash, still failed. Deleted everything on Calendar and Pass, nothing. Couldn't find anywhere how to contact support. There's a small bar that shows how much storage I'm using, one would expect that clicking on it would show a summary of what's using your storage, but all it does is show a popup with Proton's subscription plans.
I can't cancel my subscription because they don't have the basic functionality of a storage usage summary.
Hmm... Is that a problem with their more recent endeavors? I myself have only used their email and pasword manager services and I find their feature sets to be sufficient.
Also, marketing containig the letters "A" and "I" does not invalidate the product. While I absolutely despise seeing AI plastered everywhere, it is true that ML algorithms are often incredibly useful (even if LLMs aren't)
They've made a poll that had questions about AI, but no clear options to indicate that you don't want anything to deal with AI. From the results, less than 20% of the voters signalled that they wanted an AI offering from Proton, those being business users, and less than a month later Proton introduces (to business accounts at the moment) a LLM that writes email for you (that has to decrypt and read plain text the emails that were supposed to be stored with zero access encryption), and it uses a model that was trained on copyrighted data without permission.
Not even two weeks later they come up with this crypto wallet, and both endeavours are on two very sensitive and controversial topics, to a point it seems Proton is "selling out" to techbros.
All the while, you can't even create or edit folders and labels on their mail mobile apps.
Fair enough. I sure hope that "business" feature stays business-only or opti-in.
In a way I get it since from my experience the C-suites really like not writing their emails themselves so this is their way of trying not to lose existing corporate customers, however I do see how their lack of transparency is concerning.
The entire way that Proton introduced the Proton Scribe seemed very shady. Usually Proton would go on and on about transparency and all that, but with Scribe it just seemed very off, like they were purposefully avoiding talking about the thing in question.
On the Reddit post about the bitcoin wallet, Proton team is also avoiding replying to most negative constructive comments about it, and the very few that they did reply to are just trying to justify the walletand LLM because "banks have crypto ETFs", "other companies have implemented AI" and my favourite "one shouldn't confuse Bitcoin with "crypto"".
Proton is acting in a shady way with these two controversial services that seemed to appear into thin air on how quick they released those. I cannot see myself using Proton's products anymore and while trying (fighting) to cancel my subscription, I can see some dark patterns that try to prevent you from doing it, or trying to upsell you something.
Oh and by the way, Hylics is such a great game
The product was an LLM.
Oh, ok my bad 😅
It kind of does compete with Google Wallet, just with crypto instead of credit cards. It's low hanging fruit to add an analogue to a Google service on their platform.