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
this post was submitted on 17 Jun 2024
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Privacy
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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.
Having shareholders (people who contribute no labour but steal funds from an org) should be illegal
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.
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.
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.
OpenAI
I think OpenAI has always been a for-profit private company despite its name.
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.
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.
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. :)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
Welp, that's one more reason not to use proton
What? Why?
Because non profits are not universally good. With a company the objective is clear.
I don't terribly care for proton or any other "secure and private" email. I think it is mostly snake oil.
Could you clarify what you mean by snake oil?
Email is insecure by default. These companies play on wishful thinking to make people feel better about using it.
This. The best you can do is encrypt your messages locally before sending. But then your email service provider still knows where you are, when and to whom you are sending the message to, and how long is it. And so does the recepient's email provider and anyone in between. Best they can do is to promise not to keep that data. But it's just that - a promise, which there is no way to verify.
Are you a bot?
You….want them to be able to sell out in the future?
I want them to have the clear objective of making money. That gives they consumer some control as you can just not give them money. That still can be true for non profits but it isn't as powerful.
Did we read the same blog announcement?
Proton AG will still need to be financially feasible. That is not changing. You can still not give them money if youd wish. They just have backed up their mission statement with actions instead of just words.
Have you never heard of enshitifcation that is driven by profit seeking?
?