Yeah, I read that blog some time ago, and I disagree with a lot of it. Either way, I find kagi to be very transparent, and to be honest they “telling you” in non-legal conversation means nothing (I.e. Vlad answering “we use X, Y, Z”). This is why I care about facts and about legal documents. The privacy policy is what they will be held accountable for and that is what I take as a reference, for example.

Similarly I agree about this feature. This is just a way to walk the walk, and to be really on the forefront on privacy.

Tbh, I understood that just as a way to explain the difference between knowing who you are and what you do. I don’t think there was any explicit parallel between company and family. In fact in general I would say the message is pretty clear, they are them and customers are customers.

(BTW, to be picky, neither is privacy. Privacy is not lack of information, privacy is information only accessed by authorized parties. A service that collects data and uses it only for the purpose you agree with (not formally in the sense of 300 pages, really) is still private.)

The rest is very opinable stuff, you do you.

Edit: BTW asking why a feature is important is not paternalistic, and it is done on basically every post there. And why wouldn’t it be? If they need to decide to invest their limited resources they should know why customers want something, people ask all kind of stuff.

What is wrong with that comment? Also he is not an engineer, so hopefully he simply didn’t touch the implementation, nor design it, since they had to implement a public standard (although new).

They also opensourced their implementation, maybe you can go and review it.

But you try to make it seems like it was an intricate and nuanced position.

No, I integrate it with the thoughts he expressed. He didn’t back down from his opinion (on reddit), he simply elaborated more. Quite common for a tweet that due to the idiotic limitation on characters is very easy to write in ways that don’t fully express what you want to say.

I understand why some people are pissed. But some people see politics in the same way football fans see the sport. So even a tiny, indirect praise for an action that Trump does that might be actually positive (even for the wrong reason) is seen as a capital sin, because you can’t be nuanced, you can’t have specific opinions, either you are against or you are a supporter, like in football. And I fully, wholeheartedly, disagree with this attitude, at least for external observers (in this case, non US citizens), and especially once the elections are over (my judgment on this tweet would have been different if the election didn’t happen yet).

I disagree. I for sure will keep using the service, this has nothing to do with it.

I genuinely can’t see any issue with his statements, I read them in context and - while I don’t have an opinion on the subject - I think they are totally reasonable personal opinions.

Also lumping together “tech CEOs” is another (in my opinion) completely wrong generalization.

• proton is a company with a healthy business model that doesn’t harm users
• the CEO decided to give control of the company to a nonprofit to ensure the values will be followed with no pressure.
• the company is not a social media nor a company that controls what you can see, which is a big difference because alignment with one or other political view can have a huge impact in those cases (which is why zuck alignment is a much much bigger deal than Andy Yen supposed alignment).
• the company is not american, it’s not part of big tech.

So yeah, I disagree even with this part of your interpretation of the situation.

I don’t think there is any way to find a common ground. Personally I find your interpretation really forced and therefore exaggerated. Context, track record and most importantly the words of this guy do not seem to point out at all to a “mask off situation” in my opinion.

Edit: I really dislike meta-comments. I am commenting based on what interests me, whether other people do other stuff is not something I can do anything about. Please refrain to use the “people like you…” type of statements. You have no idea who I am or what I think besides this conversation.

Oh no, he tagged trump (did he? Or did he reply to the tweet in which trump announced the antitrust pick?). This 1 second action changes everything. I am glad we have already moved the goalpost. Why tagging trump would change the context of his message it’s really a mystery to me.

Look, for me it’s simple. He has expressed himself in a way that was easy to misinterpret. He clarified his thoughts, I judge him for his thoughts.

You want to judge him for what you think he meant? By no means, go ahead. Just don’t pretend it’s a fact, because it’s literally an opinion. A legitimate one, but still an opinion. The fact is that he said something and clarified that he meant something. Whether he is sincere or not is an opinion, but it doesn’t change the fact.

For the rest I don’t care to convince you or anybody else, I don’t care of Andy Yen either. What I do care is people damaging one of the very few tech companies out there that are positive exceptions to a shitty industry. I think this is way worse than a tweet - even if it praised republicans in a general sense.

Besides this, I also hate this aesthetic of purity. MacCartysm in modern sauce.

https://www.reddit.com/r/ProtonMail/comments/1i2nz9v/on_politics_and_proton_a_message_from_andy/m7hfhdh/

I will quote his own words:

Unfortunately that was misinterpreted. If you go back to the original tweet in question, it is clear from the context that that is about “little tech” vs "big tech

I know we are in the internet in 2025, and nobody has the right to clarify their opinion anymore, one strike and you are out, but still.

To me it was obvious from the context to be honest, without even needing his own explanation (that you call backpedaling because good faith is never assumed). But then again, I was not looking for reasons to be outraged.

It’s hilarious though that reporting the authors own thoughts you call misinformation. Instead drawing your own conclusions that are explicitly denied by that person is supposedly objective. If there are no more rules of logic then everything goes.

Also this is not bootlicking, it’s just a timid defense of rationality in the face of people building castles in the air.

You can if you use the bridge, which is not perfect but basically does the GPG encryption/decryption for you and exposes IMAP etc. (I think you can also do your own PGP encryption on top, not sure).

The supply chain issue you discuss is the same with any tool, with the exception that with proton you have an automated update system (I.e. every time the page loads js code), while with more traditional tooling you upgrade based on your choice (more or less). You are likely not checking the code in either case, but a malicious update could backdoor or bypass your encryption either way. Technically you can build the proton client yourself but anyway, this is just theoretical stuff, nobody does that.

Gmail + GPG is anyway worse, first of all from a UX perspective, where every device needs to be managed separately (GPG keys need to be available, you need to manage them, managing keys and keeping them secure is hard). Second, you will use GPG only with selected people of whom you have the key. With proton you will use it automatically for all Proton users at the very least and all proton users can use it with you automatically too.

Then there is the problem with metadata. They cannot be encrypted of course, and with gmail you are 100% sure they are using them to profile you and mine whatever data can be mined (e.g., who you talk to), while with proton you can reasonably be confident they don’t.

I mean, “spin it”, that’s literally what the tweet said, in a response to a tweet (from trump, hence the tag) that announced that pick. He praised the pick and generalized on the fact that republicans are more likely than democrats to fight big tech. Good or wrong that’s everything that was said and a perfectly legitimate opinion, even if I may disagree.

This also happened in December, not yesterday.

the Republicans are now the party of the small people

He didn’t. He clearly meant small tech in that context, opposed to big tech\monopolies. Not only this is the only interpretation that makes sense, but he said this himself in a clarifying (personal) reddit comment.

“Tagging Trump” because it was an answer (quote? Not sure what is the xitter term) to the tweer where Trump announced the pick for antitrust.

I do disagree with the person you are answering to, he did praise republicans. He did in a very narrow context and for specific (although opinable) reasons and he praised Trump for having made that specific pick.

Personally, I don’t see what the big deal is.

Or the year before again etc. It’s their 7th edition. Apparently the memory of outraged netizens has a very short time window…

They do that every year. The 2024 was the 7th edition.

I don’t need to try, I do, all the time. I use simplelogin aliases, as I said, which means I have passmail.net, simplelogin.com etc. emails. Trashmail is a disposable email address, which is already different. So far, I have never encountered a problem with a “privacy domain”.

Again, I am not claiming that the problems don’t exist, but that it’s maybe few niche sites. And why wouldn’t it be the case? Most orders require invoice data, which is personal data, or a shipping destination which is again personal. Why a seller would inherently care of the email address I use? Also anybody can create gmail accounts, so why proton would be different? It doesn’t make any sense to me, and in fact I don’t see this problem.

Can you maybe list a few sites for which proton addresses wouldn’t work?

He didn’t say that though, he thinks Republicans are the party more likely to fight for “small tech” against big tech in the antitrust space. You can still consider this bad judgment but it’s purely an opinion that he motivated from his point of view with a few data points.

Digital rights are an indirect benefit that may derive for breaking big tech monopolies, but nothing was mentioned.

Edit: for those downvoting, this is factual. Just go check the tweet and the reddit comments he did. If you want to be pissed at someone at least choose what that person did or said.

Yep, a complete drama over nothing that got many people start a witch hunt. We already reached the point in which the guy is now a Nazi for having chosen a username with 88 in it, despite the fact that he is Taiwanese AND born in that year. Basically this is the well-meaning, internet vigilantes version of “bill gates injects 5g microchips with vaccines”.

It’s what happens when politics becomes faith.

I use simplelogin aliases for everything. I have never had any problem with any purchase. So, I understand this may happen, but claiming that “many websites” do is just plain misinformation.

Most of Italian recipes are very simple. The focus usually is on quality on the ingredients and if they are good, a pizza with just mozzarella and tomatoes is already delicious. That said, even in Italy there are plenty of types of pizzas, but most of them don’t have 20 ingredients, I suppose the point is that you actually want to taste what you eat, which is not the case when you mix many different things. There is a very messy and rich pizza (capricciosa) with a lot of toppings though (more than one obviously, but this is the most common).

Personally I am a margherita person, simple and boring is perfect, as long as it tastes great.

P.s. Giuseppe :)

For what is worth, that’s not how (most?) Italians think about pizza. It’s not a “container” in which you put a bunch of things, but each pizza type is basically a separate dish.

I personally don’t care what people put on their pizza, I simply avoid places that make “pizzas” in a non-italian fashion, like the american (supposedly NY style) ones where you get crust, 2 fingers of industrial cheese and a whole plant of oregano.

It’s very similar for pasta, which many people think as a bread replacement.