I’ve had it up to here with Proton.
I’m an Unlimited subscriber, but even so I receive promotional ads in the Proton VPN app for Android (e.g., “Limited time offer…” or “x% off…”), which is something I find distracting and weird, since my subscription is active. These promotions don’t always appear in the app, but it was really bad around the turn of the new year. It made me feel like I was using some sketchy crapware I accidentally downloaded from the Play store vs. a legitimate VPN app.
Let me make this clear: I am not talking about emails! I know how to manage emails, but for some weird reason, it’s all anyone ever responds with. If one more person replies with information on how to manage email subscriptions, so help me…
I am specifically talking about promotions that appear to be baked into the app itself and are indismissable and perpetually visible within the app. (See my examples above, if you’re still confused by what I mean. I wish I’d taken screenshots last time it happened.)
Another issue I’ve had with Proton is that occasionally I will receive popups on their web site that entirely obstruct the screen and have no way to bypass them. Here’s an example of one advertising Proton Pass, that has no x button and nothing to click except “Start using Proton Pass now,” which is not something I want to do!
If you check my comment history, you can see multiple instances of my asking the Proton fediverse account (I think they’re on Mastodon) about these things, and every time without fail, they reply telling me how to manage email subscriptions, which (to be clear) IS NOT AT ALL WHAT I’M TALKING ABOUT, IN FACT I WAS VERY EXPLICIT ABOUT THIS.
So I finally contacted them via support. Here’s what I said:
How can I disable notifications for promotions on your web site? (See: https://i.postimg.cc/FsvxM5CH/proton-Copy.png)
How can I disable notifications for promotions in the Proton VPN app for Android?
I’m not talking about emails, but about the “50% off now!!!” or “Try our new product!!!” style advertisements that I keep seeing.
I am a subscriber to Unlimited, and I do not want to see these self-promoting ads from Proton.
Let me just quote this one more time. I said:
I’m not talking about emails
So here’s the response I got:
I … I can’t fucking believe it.
I’ve sent one last message about this, but I don’t feel very hopeful at this point. If they replied with something like, “Unfortunately, we don’t allow users to dismiss promotions,” I could probably live with that … but this total dodging and ignoring simple questions is a huge red flag. Do I trust these people with my privacy when they can’t even answer a simple question?
Fortunately, all of these services have viable alternatives, so if they are unable to answer me this time, then farewell to Proton. I’m sick of this shit.
If you keep trying the support route, I figure I’ll throw in my general tech support 2c, at the risk of it being unhelpful.
I’ve had to fight my natural temptation to “over specify” or “increase specificity” when tech support sometimes doesn’t “get” my problem. the extra words (like “this is NOT about the emails”) can seem like they’re narrowing things down, but can instead make the canned response system or the underpaid human scanning the email confused about the context. I generally now suggest “underspecifying” - go for something simpler that requires someone to engage you somehow to resolve the problem. Like, “my problem is that I unsubscribed from your emails like you told me to, but I’m still getting them, it didn’t work”. Then suddenly, this might be a bug report of something broken. That gets a lot more attention… upstream humans need to look at it to decide if it’s something affecting just you or everyone on the whole system. When they are in the process of determining this, they’ll have to notice you’re referring to the push notifications and not actual emails in order to decide it’s not a big problem waiting to happen for them.
This underspecificity has helped me a lot in getting better customer support. I never intend to lie outright or be rude… I just lower my skill level. A lot. To a low-tech user, the difference between a push notification and an email is not terribly clear. These support systems tend to work better on low-tech users because, well, most people are low-tech.
Oh so for example, I could say: “I tried this, but it didn’t work.”