Just sitting here waiting on the peeps who know more about stuff to chime in on this, cause it sounds awesome. But I’ve been burned before so I’m hesitant
Seems solid.
It doesn’t change a ton, but the point was basically them putting their money where their mouth is and saying “now we can’t sell out like everything else.”
If you liked them before, this is great. It means google or whoever literally can’t buy them out, it’s not about the money. If you were iffy already because they’re not FOSS or whatever other reason, this doesn’t change that, either, for better or worse
What is this buying out talked about something not escapable if not some legal reorganization is made? It has been being talked about other companies, too, and it sounds like if you have a form of a company, you can’t legally refuse monetary offers from someone to buy your company.
Is there such a legal mechanism that forces an owner to sell out if an offer is made, or is this more about proofing a company against CEO/shareholder personal sell out decision?
A company with a public offering basically cannot refuse a large enough buyout because with a public offering comes a financial responsibility to the shareholders. Public stock is a contract saying give me money and I’ll do my best to make you money back, and it’s very legally binding.
You can avoid this by never going public, but that also means you basically don’t get big investors for expanding what you can offer. A public offering involves losing some of your rights as owner for cash.
When the legal goal becomes “money above all else”, it is hard to justify NOT selling all the data and violating the trust of your customers for money, customer loyalty has to be monetizable and also worth more.
Proton has given a majority share to a nonprofit with a legal requirement to uphold the current values, not make money. This means that the remaining ownership can be sold to whoever, the only way anything gets done is if this foundation agrees. It prevents everything associated with a legal financial responsibility to make money, but still allows the business to do business things and make money, which seems to be proton’s founder’s belief, that the software should be sold to be sustainable.
Thanks for the detailed explanation about publicly traded companies, but what I wonder is the privately owned ones being forced to sell out, if there is such a thing.
For example, lets say Proton is owned by a few shareholders or just one, and it is not openly traded unless the shareholders make personal agreements to sell out or anything like that. If Google came with a truckload of cash and told these shareholders to sell their shares to Google, can they simply refuse the offer no matter how big is the pile of cash or the benefits of the offer, or do they have to find a legal reason to keep their shares? I mean, even the question sounds stupid and the answer should be “yeah you can just keep your share and run the company however you like, as long as you don’t go public listing”, but with all the concerns about the buyouts talked all around this last few years, the premise looks like it is hard to hold out.
There are different types. The “financial duty” of corporations is generally overblown, however that is more or less what happened with Twitter. Elon made such a dumb offer that they had to put it to their shareholders. There’s some mechanism where shareholders can vote as a whole to sell, and if the vote passes then you don’t get a choice.
But generally corporations absolutely aren’t required to do whatever makes the most money. They’re allowed to put other values above pure profit, as long as they can justify it being in the shareholders’ interests. The shareholders may disagree and vote them out because of it, but as long as it was plausible, it’s legal. For instance, I believe the board of an Oil company could decide to shut down their wells and fully pivot to renewables, and I don’t think the courts would hold them accountable. Preventing climate change is easily arguable as in the shareholders’ interest, even at the cost of significant money. However that board would likely quickly be voted out. (And it’s unlikely they would have gotten there if they didn’t love oil money.)
If you own 51% of shares, public or not, you can’t be forced to sell afaik. And if you’re private, you’d have to do some pretty big illegal defamation or something to be forced to sell your property. Or you could die and your descendents could decide to sell.
One issue is that we’ve set up our tax system to encourage cashing out asap. For the most part in the US, you’re going to be taxed at 37% whether you sell now or whether you have the company pay you out for the next twenty years. So why not get out while the gettin’ is good? In the past, with a 90% top marginal rate at a higher income, it was often better to keep your money in the company and in the reputation, and just have it pay you out at a medium tax bracket for the next fifty years. All you really need to do as your job is make sure the company stays stable anyway. You can do that while spending four days on the golf course.
Thanks a lot, this makes a whole lot more contextual awareness for the situation.
great explanation, thanks!
Excellent explanation. Thank you
Having shareholders (people who contribute no labour but steal funds from an org) should be illegal
I think a publicly traded company works that way as they have a fiduciary duty to the shareholders to make money, but the non-profit (controlling) part of proton has no such duty as their primary directive is their mission. They said I’m mostly talking out of my ass so I certainly could be wrong
Maybe the founders can’t sell out anymore, but looking at what Raspberrypi just did the company can still end up partially on the stock market.
It’s a bit different because of the stated values though.
Raspberry pi’s foundation is focused on making computers available broadly, while this new organization is focused on making privacy widely accessible.
While both can be commercialized, the pi’s foundation has no fundamental problems with selling out privacy or focusing on money to achieve those goals. Proton would have a much harder time arguing that profiting from sale.of private data supports privacy.
This is relevant because it means even if the remaining shares end up on the stock market, the foundation can use its majority ownership to veto any privacy concerns.
Time will tell. I could also have missed something
Wait, what happened with Raspberry Pi?
Awesome! Been a customer for a while, waiting for the family pack supporting at least 4 separate users for a custom domain for a fair price.
Seems legit. Going towards a better business model. Don’t know if anything stops them going from non-profit to profit as OpenAI did buy at least their movinf the other way now with intent towards the opposite.
I’ll keep using their service at least.
OpenAI
I think OpenAI has always been a for-profit private company despite its name.
Don’t know if anything stops them going from non-profit to profit as OpenAI
Don’t know about other countries but that’s illegal in the US and not what happened.
Much like Mozilla and RPi, they have a for-profit and a non-profit arm.
Which is the same structure that Proton is moving to.
Seems like all that will change is the fact that all profits made will be reinvested in the company, im not an expert though, so i may be wrong
Well that’s cool:). Remove the profit motive/surplus goes a long way to slow down evil.
Proton will still be a for-profit company that will be majority-controlled by a non-profit. The non-profit will not own all of the business either, so there will still be profits going to shareholders.
Many for-profit companies do this as well.
But are they also required to do so?
Any excess profits not reinvested are paid as dividends to share holders. However, if you’re reinvesting that money from dividends into buying more shares then there’s no difference between the two. Think of it like this. If I’m a company and I have a dollar, I can either invest it in the company and make my value go up by a dollar or give my share holders a dollar. Of course, in the inverse situation, the share.holder can just sell a dollar worth of stock and the situation is the same.
So there really isn’t too much of a difference between the two.
Fair honestly, I’m more or less in the same boat 😅
In this world of enshittification and organizations becoming more and more aggressive, it’s so nice and refreshing to see proton doing the opposite and moving to a better model :)
I think proton was never going to function as a profit-first business. Too many enshittified rival businesses. Kinda the natural outcome.
Proton and Mullvad leading the way
Except Mullvad VPN is better for privacy.
Can you explain how or why is the Mullvad VPN better for privacy than Proton’s?
Mullvad is proven. Not that proton is not, but there were a few controversies about their operations.
Mullvad is accepting payments with actual private crypto currencies. Mullvad had authorities visit their operations site, demanding data and left empty handed as they did not have anything to offer. The same cannot be said for proton. I personally like that they do not offer free services and that they are advocating for privacy through ads and foss projects like the mullvad browser.
Proton is only publishing on f-droid, their vpn and recently their pass application. They have yet to provide notification services for de-googled devices after years of community demands. They have opt out telemetry.(except the proton pass through f-droid.) while mullvad does not, correct me if I am wrong on this.
Since you asked about the VPN, everything mullvad is running is on ram so nothing is saved. (I think this is only for their owned servers though not all of them.)
That being said, I use the proton suite as there is no other alternative right now and the casual user in me is satisfied. :)
Proton requires an account, which gives them some of your info, while Mullvad does not, giving you an anonymous account number instead.
If Proton really doesn’t log VPN traffic, then it doesn’t really matter. But since Mullvad does not have that same personal info, they would be unable to provide law enforcement or 3rd party data brokers any hard data aside from your IP if they wanted to.
They support both bitcoin and mailed envelopes of cash. Proton only has the info you give them.
This makes me want to upgrade my plan.
I’ve got the unlimited plan and it’s well worth the money. Simplelogin integration is great.
I wish the forwarding with email aliases would function a bit differently. Right now the alias is set as the recipient in the email and I wish you could set the recipient email to whatever email you want (like one of the additional emails you can set in Proton Mail) because the way it is now it makes my general filters useless and I would have to add even more filters.
Edit: I created a suggestions on their feedback site here: https://protonmail.uservoice.com/forums/953584-proton-pass/suggestions/48496442-show-use-forwards-to-email-as-recipient-in-forwa if anyone cares to vote for it.
That’s a good point - voting for it!
For my purposes I have a second proton email for things I may want to keep credentials for which I filter out, and the simple logins are almost always complete burners so I end up deleting half of them anyway. The moment I start getting unwanted spam I touch the simple login accounts and start making new ones.
As someone with many hobbies I get things from all sorts of sites so it’s just kind of necessary if I don’t want to drown in spam lol
Just voted and left a comment. Spot on suggestion.
I don’t use proton but I feel like when people email me from simple login alias emails, it breaks encryption.
Why is that? Genuinely asking, you clearly know more about this than I do.
Probably because the uid on their key must match their email address
I upgraded mine but haven’t talked to the wife about including her yet because the family plan is for up to 6 so it’d be cheaper to just buy two individual subscriptions, she doesn’t really care enough to justify that much extra cost. Hopefully Proton adds another plan or two for groups!
Same. I’m admittedly mostly a freeloader right now but this definitely will convince me to buy in.
Support the apps that protect you. I recommend Signal and Proton VPN.
I recommend mullvad
At my school, mullvad is one of the only VPNs that work since basically every port is blocked except ports 80 and 443 using TCP. Mullvad can use wireguard over TCP on 443, which is very useful.
My use case as well!
I hear Mullvad is great but my problem with it is it doesn’t support port forwarding (ProtonVPN is pretty much the only one in the market AFAIK that does).
Not so much a problem if you have high up speeds (like with fiber) or don’t do a lot of torrenting (or are an asshole and torrent without seeding), but I don’t have fiber and have a max up speed of like 15–20 Mb/s.
This was literally the one thing that made me pick proton over mullvad. I know I’m not exactly alone in this, but inbound traffic does matter.
Same. If it wasn’t for this, I would be switching to Mullvad personally. Especially after Proton getting rid of profiles for their Android app. That bullshit really pissed me off, as the app is actually less functional now.
The opposite of the OpenAI.
Honestly, a very impressive move. Makes me way more confident in the trajectory of the company and I’m happy to have been a visionary user for multiple years.
I wonder, though, just how much of Proton A.G. does the foundation now own? They say it’s the largest shareholder, but they didn’t say “majority shareholder”.
Man, I wish I could afford their rates. They’re just a little bit higher than I can justify compared to other options for a given service.
It is a nice PR but for me I am not impressed. Rolex is also a non profit organization in Switzerland and and mostly help hiding there finance.
Correct me if I am wrong but all I see is words and promises. I would trust them if they release the yearly finance transparently.
For now the only act I can judge them on is their collaboration with police to give ecologist activists IP.
It is a nice PR but for me I am not impressed. Rolex is also a non profit organization in Switzerland and and mostly help hiding there finance.
Okay but Rolex is Rolex. There are uncountably many non-profits, and many (most?) do good work. I don’t think Rolex is representative of your usual non profit.
Can you elaborate on that? They turned over an ecologist activists IP?
You can search it online : I don’t know any good media so here’s the first result on DuckDuckGo https://www.theverge.com/2021/9/6/22659861/protonmail-swiss-court-order-french-climate-activist-arrest-identification
Just because it’s still in my clipboard from another post:
https://proton.me/blog/climate-activist-arrest
Long story short, they got ordered to do so by a court, which is legally binding and they won’t go to jail for you.
They won’t go to jail, period. No company owners never go to jail, kinda ever. This phrase is out of proportion. At worse they would have a fine.
Also still in the blog everything is words and very opaque like " We do this not only through technology and advocacy (Proton has contributed over $500,000 toward defending these values around the world)" : like where, what, when?
“There was no legal possibility to resist or fight this particular request.” : I doubt very much unless Switzerland is a dictatorship in disguise.
“Switzerland generally will not assist prosecutions from countries without fair justice systems.” : clearly not.
Every webprovider or server in the EU is forced to reveal datas of an user because an court order in a criminal investigation, with even the risk that the service will be closed, apart of high fines if they don’t. If you are an criminal, it’s better to message with paper and pen, otherwise they’ll find you, independent which online service you use.
They won’t go to jail, period. No company owners never go to jail, kinda ever.
That’s absolutely not true. Sure, there are lots of cases where individuals have limited personal liability under their company, but this doesn’t mean no-one goes to jail for illegal business activity. In fact it happens all the time.
Also still in the blog everything is words and very opaque like " We do this not only through technology and advocacy (Proton has contributed over $500,000 toward defending these values around the world)" : like where, what, when?
Should they always go into a downward spiral and explain everything they did? Check out the Proton Christmas fundraisers, that’s what they are talking about
There was no legal possibility to resist or fight this particular request." : I doubt very much unless Switzerland is a dictatorship in disguise.
No legal system in the world allows you to fight everything all the time. Get to reality.
Switzerland generally will not assist prosecutions from countries without fair justice systems." : clearly not.
Wasn’t that case in France? Don’t remember exactly. Not sure if you’re calling France to have unfair justice systems, but then you should probably look for a new planet, because nothing is 100% fair unfortunately.
You can still distinguish between very bad, kind of bad, okayish, and mostly good.
Damn that’s so fucking sad.
“Crucially, the order did not provide the contents of the activist’s email, which are encrypted and cannot be accessed by Proton. Yen said a similar order would also not be able to provide ProtonVPN metadata, as VPNs are subject to different requirements under Swiss law.”
From the verge article
For now the only act I can judge them on is their collaboration with police to give ecologist activists IP.
You mean because they were forced to? Like every other Swiss organization under the exact same order? I always find this type of “argument” so purposefully obtuse.
Non-profit and all this stuff is nice, but where is the dark secret?
No dark secret, Proton products are OpenSource, made by cientifics of the CERN in Swiss. They make its incommings with the premium products, serving the free ones without ads and trackings or loggings.
Makes me even more suspicious, I have to comprehend this.
More suspicious than an American commercial company offering the services? Proton is not a commercial company, they really do not need to make money with their services, all they charge you is the use of servers and hosts based on a certain amount of data that you claim, in the VPN they are one of the few that offer you a use of unlimited data with a more than acceptable speed in the free version, without ads, logs and military-level encryption, the only thing is a limited number of countries in the free version (23 server in three countries).
The same with Mail or the cloud service, where space is naturally limited in the free account, but privacy is the same as in the premium account at a very high level. If you don’t trust it, you are also free to host the services yourself, since they are all OpenSource.
I’m pretty sure they were being sarcastic.
Sounds like a gigantic honeypot. To good to be true, it can’t be that I finally found someone I can trust, or can it?
You can, every product of a company which are not profit centered apart being OpenSource, by definition is way more trustworth than proprietary soft of big US companies. Proton services made it’s fame because of its known reliability since a lot of years.
As if Gmail or Outlook were any better?
Protonmail, their flagship product, actually treats 99.9% of emails in clear-text. You can’t have end-to-end encryption if the other person at the end doesn’t support it. There have been (unverified) rumors that Proton could be a giant honeypot. They did help authorities in the past. Maybe we will understand better who they are in the future
They did cooperate with authorities, but they also took their time in disclosures to explain precisely what the user did wrong, and how you can avoid making the same mistakes. At the end of the day, Proton only has the information you provide them. And if you don’t encrypt your stuff, it’s not safe.
Proton serves privacy, not anonymity. They will not collect, harvest, analyse or sell your data. If you however use their services for illegal things they will forward whatever - usually little - unencrypted information they have about you.
I’m surprised people would expect them to behave differently. Do they expect Proton to not comply with lawful warrants?
For profit companies are horribly inefficient and there’s better ways to organize human labour, despite capitalist propaganda.
I was this close to upgrade to the paid plan, and this is the final push I needed
Nice !
Maybe that will allow them to get rid of their marketing habits !Would be very nice, that’s one reason I use Tuta and not Proton
We recently purchased the family plan even if it is quite expensive for a couple. Reading this of course made me feel better about it.
I was sketched out by their move to get rid of inactive free accounts, but this is nice to see. Really hate the idea that if I’m unplugged just for a bit I lose a ton of contacts.
You need to be unplugged for 12 consecutive months for Proton to delete your account because of inactivity though, which seems fair for free tier accounts. A simple login is enough to prevent this, you do not need to send an email or whatever, simply log in once a year. You also get reminders sent to your recovery email before this happens. Data storage for inactive free tier accounts isn’t free for Proton.
Not to rain on the parade, but as long as we allow the reality-sized hole that is non-profits owning for-profits, this isn’t something I can get terribly excited about.
