Summary
Proton Mail, known for its privacy-first email services, faced backlash after CEO Andy Yen praised the Republican Party and its antitrust stance.
The company initially posted and deleted a statement supporting Yen’s comments, later claiming an “internal miscommunication” and reiterating its political neutrality.
Critics question Proton’s impartiality, particularly as it cooperates with Swiss authorities on legal data requests.
Privacy advocates warn that political alignments could undermine trust, especially for Proton’s users—journalists and activists wary of government surveillance under administrations like Trump’s.
So, try placing an online order with a @trashmail.com or @armylspy.com email address then tell us what happened.
There are maasive lists of bad and dodgy email domains that are used to help screen out dodgy orders. Some of these lists include “privacy” domains like Proton.
If a merchant is receiving an order from someone trying to hide their identity, wouldn’t that merchant say “if I can’t trust the email address, what else can’t I trust about this customer?”
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?