Interview with Andy Yen, CEO of Proton VPN
72 comments
·January 27, 2025wraptile
huijzer
I think the blunder is firmly with the people who caused the blowback. I don’t think it’s a good idea to all be up in arms whenever someone says something you disagree with.
fnordsensei
For context, people were upset about using the official accounts to endorse a party wholesale, in direct violation of their charter.
A subset were also upset with the nature of the endorsement.
And then you could also discuss whether a CEO of a company has to consider what they say, regardless if they're using an official account or not. This is more of a gray area, and has people divided.
I'm personally of the opinion that, as a CEO, you're always representing your company when speaking to the public to some extent.
biohcacker84
All of the above makes sense, until you consider all the things the prior administration did to tech startups, privacy, crypto and more.
And to consider all of it you unfortunately have to have been red-pilled in the past.
If you can consider it, than everything above is like 1% as bad as silence during the prior administration.
protonprivacy
Andy did not endorse Trump, just the Republican nominee for antitrust. Nevertheless, we have retracted the statement, which was put out by mistake due to an internal miscommunication. Proton is not controlled by any single person but by the nonprofit Proton Foundation, which has neutrality in its governing principles, and that remains the case today.
wraptile
In my opinion this is clearly a display of a character flaw. I simply don't trust Proton now that it's CEO revealed itself to be of such flawed thought. Isn't that the whole job of a CEO?
pixxel
Character flaws now include people you disagree with. JFC.
xcv123
[flagged]
Vaslo
In my opinion, this is clearly a display of a character strength. I strongly trust proton now that its CEO revealed itself to be of such strong character. Isn’t that the whole job of a ceo? For every one of you, there is one of me to offset you and increase my support of the product. You probably don’t even use them and never intended you, and the rest of the user base is better for it.
Spooky23
I don’t think it’s good optics for CEOs to be simping for POTUS without a clear rationale.
Why is a privacy focused company from Switzerland kissing the ring? It’s a relevant question given the business they are in.
sofixa
> I don’t think it’s a good idea to all be up in arms whenever someone says something you disagree with
Of course not, but there's a difference between disagreeing with which is the best recipe for a cheesecake, the best castle in France, or whether or not it's acceptable to invade your neighbouring countries, if the government should be following the law/constitution, or basic biology, etc.
Some opinions one disagrees with are very worth to be up in arms. I'd even say that people have a civic duty of being up in arms against certain egregious topics. Say if a politician says that they want to allow for 9 year olds to be married to adults; or a rich guy backing multiple politicians all over the world Sieg Heils on national television; or a politician that just got elected is asking for money for favours from companies; or there's talk of "other"ing significant swathes of the population.
pixxel
[flagged]
Vaslo
Blunder? You mean strong character?
The good news for us is that you probably don’t use them and never intended to. Thank goodness for us, especially us folks in the visionary tier who’ve known this is the best VPN/Email provider for years who. You’d just muddy up the forums with all your political nonsense.
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unbrice
To the best of my knowledge he endorsed specific behavior about specific policies, not "Trump's political picks". I wish topics vaguely adjacent to US politics could be discussed in less divisive and polarized ways.
input_sh
The tweet in question literally starts with "Great pick by @realDonaldTrump".
Temporary_31337
I think that’s the parents point one can endorse specific policies from a person without necessarily endorsing everything else. Btw that’s the beauty of democracy- people made their choices and can still voice their concerns even after the election. Contrast that with Venezuela, China or Russia mentioned in the article.
blindriver
I don't think there is any way that any VPN company can convince me they aren't secretly run by the CIA or some other country's equivalent.
lordofgibbons
The way I look at it is that my ISP is very open about collecting and selling "anonymized" data based on users' internet usage.
On the other hand, a reputable VPN provider has everything to lose if word got out that they collect or sell information.
The privacy calculus is: 100% chance vs some small chance.
threecheese
Even if the VPN provider is doing something naughty-ish, just decoupling netflow info from your IRL id/address/financials/probably TV habits info has value. Even if you can’t control the usage of behavior data by multiple organizations, you can try to “anonymize” it at the boundaries between them. Indirection, to minimize how much becomes associated with your identity.
Really only valid for individual company adversaries though, depends on your threat model I guess.
Edit: it’s sad that I need a threat model
Salgat
That's assuming the financial incentivize of an intelligence agency is not sufficient to cover the risk.
GoofballJones
Legit question: What can an ISP collect when most of the time I'm going to secure "https:" websites? I mean, they can only see the website I'm going to, but not what is going on there, right?
Is just collecting where people are going that lucrative to sell?
Spooky23
The DNS data is super useful for developing a demographic profile.
For example, they could pretty trivially assert with high confidence that a pregnant woman is in your home or that you’re shopping for a car. The tinfoil hat scenarios are interesting as well.
eptcyka
DNS records and net flow data. They can also inject JS in http sites, hijack domaijs to do the same, do traffic shaping. But I am biased, I work for a VPN company.
lordofgibbons
There's what websites/apps you use, but also your behavior patterns. Are you a night owl? How often do you check some website or app. I'm sure there's a lot of other information they do gather based on the "metadata"
112233
Not what they can, what they MUST as required by law. Assuming US, see DTA aka CALEA - at any time little green men with a warrant can ask for tranparrent packet capture of ISP client's traffic.
Also, in many places (Europa) there is collection and retention requirements for ISPs.
agieocean
That + other data can be used to build a behavorial profile so it's not what your ISP is doing necessarily but what the people they sell the data to are doing with it (or the people they sell to)
jesperwe
Not even https://mullvad.net/en/why-mullvad-vpn? (The only VPN I've heard of that allows you to pay anonymously with cash)
fransje26
Well, it wouldn't be the first encryption-related Swiss company run by the CIA. :-)
ipaddr
It's more most smaller VPN brands are surprisingly owned by one company Nord.. It's not all vpns it's just if you took 100 brands 90 of them are owned leased from Nord
radicaldreamer
How about iCloud Private Relay?
jiveturkey
or MPR (https://invisv.com/articles/relay) in general.
cedws
I don’t know about CIA, but something about Proton has always felt off.
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jimmydoe
I hope he learns the lesson that talking about his political view is not very helpful for his business.
defrost
In Australia, from my PoV, that's not a "political view", that's very much a policy position.
He's very much in favour of anti-trust legislation which in many ways aligns with his business.
He has side leaked a political preference for the US Democrats, but is prepared to applaud the US Republicans for this one specifc appointment.
It's disapointing the US devolved into a two party Hotelling’s law quagmire and became captured by the first ray of difference, it'd be better to see the end of First Past the Post and a wider range of smaller parties that were forced to interact on policy issues to better represent a wider demographic.
philwelch
I’m skeptical that multiparty systems actually fix anything. Even when they work, it’s because poorly unaligned parties form coalitions on a largely unpredictable basis, and the only hard and fast rule is that the largest minority party gets to choose the chancellor or PM, just like you would get with FPTP. In the worst cases, like in Israel and Belgium, it becomes impossible to form a stable majority coalition for years on end no matter how many snap elections you call.
Also, the US has had a two party system for a very long time, and not all of that time was characterized by moralistic screeching whenever someone praised the “wrong” party on something like antitrust policy.
defrost
You can be skeptical, they're still a viable alternative to the non representative duality the US has spiralled into.
> Also, the US has had a two party system for a very long time,
No doubt, that's one hallmark of that long slow spiral into a non representative deadlock.
You likely recall the US founding founders opinions on political parties .. not a lot of fans as I recall (although admitedly I'm not a US citizen).
The current voting system of the US has a tendancy to iteratively approach bad two party standoffs that better represent small powerful minority groups rather than the nations demographic as a whole.
> just like you would get with FPTP.
That's good to mention again; multiple parties and a change to one of the preferential ranking voting systems.
There are multiple examples about the globe, some don't have deadlock issues .. and a stable majority coalition isn't a requirement to representationally vote on policy, and once passed, if passed, policy falls to the civil service in carry through.
notepad0x90
Unless they back track on his statements convincingly, I too am shopping for alternatives. Very sad, this is the one service I didn't expect to be caught up in US politics like this.
cyberpunk
A tweet with a vague endorsement of a political appointment is enough to make you change email provider?
Are you also changing your phone manufacturer, bank, plumber, hair stylist too? Or don’t you bother checking their affiliations as closely?
angoragoats
FWIW, I will no longer be a customer of any company where I am aware that they financially or politically support the current regime. That especially includes local service providers.
notepad0x90
Sure, I'm trying! I don't even care about supporting or not supporting a specific political party or side. I just don't want to support oligarchy. I don't want to do business with companies that are participating in politics.
Also, email is the most critical service most of us use, it is very important to know your email provider isn't supportive of a political regime, specially when that regime is using data collection for retribution, deportations, firings,etc..
archagon
If a business owner endorses a fascist, it is ethical to divest yourself from that business.
RayVR
I didn’t read this article in-depth. What are you referring to specifically?
mossTechnician
He wrote a Twitter post praising Trump's administration and criticizing Democrats[0], then doubled down on the official Proton account[1]. Then he backpedaled, saying the official account statements were an accident[2].
[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/ProtonMail/comments/1i1zjgn/so_that...
[1] https://archive.ph/2025.01.15-162500/https://www.reddit.com/...
[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/ProtonMail/comments/1i2nz9v/comment...
jimmydoe
Thanks, this is what I was referring to.
Honestly I'm quite confused why he chose to talk about that.
joejohnson
It’s crazy this caused such a stir. Everything Andy said was not wrong.
philwelch
I did read the article in depth and I have the same question. Aside from wanting to let people access the complete uncensored internet even when their government would prefer them not to, which seems to be their entire mission in the first place.
Vaslo
So you say - however, it makes a lot of Proton users know they made the right choice by choosing Proton and paying for visionary service.
est
idk but VPN is currently the #10 top free app in US apptore.
simondanerd
I wouldn't think VPN Super Unlimited Proxy (https://www.mobilejump.mobi/) is on-par with Proton VPN (https://protonvpn.com/).
Still interesting that it's #10 though.
Was hoping this would cover the latest Twitter blunder of Andy Yen endorsing Trump's political picks and saying "republicans are there for small business now" which had a major blow back.
Some context on reddit: https://old.reddit.com/r/ProtonMail/comments/1i2nz9v/on_poli...