Andy Yen’s values are incompatible with Proton’s mission. He advocates for poor security practices, supports fascists, and he verbally abuses his subordinates. As such, I can no longer in good conscience continue to financially support a company with such terrible leadership.
Unfortunately for me, my subscription just renewed last month on a multi year plan, but it does give me time to browse for and experiment with alternatives.
If you’re able, I encourage you to do the same and cite Andy Yen as the driving factor for your decision. We can’t let these tech bro fascists destroy what little semblance of privacy we have left.
https://web.archive.org/web/20261029143048/https://www.404media.co/manifestos-fear-and-loser-thinking-inside-protons-ai-reckoning/
The 404 Article in Full
…and when that (or any) archive.org link returns
429 Too Many Requestsbecause of your VPN, pull it up in Tor Browser. Bless 'em for still allowing Tor exits, fuck 'em for blocking VPNs.What the hell is going on? They are a privacy focused company. Why do they need to chase increased recurring annual revenue and ship features as fast as possible if they aren’t publicly traded? Andy Yen can spout his corporate jargon, saying “the company is underperforming” and “not reaching it’s recurring annual revenue goals”, but why does that matter if the company is healthy? Does he want to make the company more profitable to fill his own pockets with bonuses? I would think as CEO of Proton you would be somewhat committed to the cause, but this restructuring and AI push flies in the face of that. It must be a healthy dose of AI psychosis as well.
They can just be like Valve, do nothing while the competition shoots themselves in the foot and profit.
Being a CEO is a terminal fucking disease nowadays.
He thinks he’s not rich enough, so he’s looking at rump, mush, and alt-man, and suck, and going, you know, those guys are really, really rich. What are they doing? Give me all of that. I’m not just going to follow their path; I’m going to trailblaze ahead of them, and I’m going to do it without the trained staff or unlimited funds. I’m just going to do it because it’s magic and my AI tells me I can do that.
I know that because it’s exactly what my CEO is doing.
Holy hell… I was expecting it to be something AI related but Yen is straight up acting like a Musk wannabe. And I was seriously considering a switch to Proton but I think I’m going to bin that idea now
It really does show a complete lack of understanding of his own userbase. We don’t want new useless features fast. We want secure, private and reliable services.
They rolled out lumo chatbot. I just wanted decent linux support for VPN and drive, especially as a years-long visionary-tier supporter. I overpaid for years because I shared the same vision but its was always a second class experience on Linux.
I cant believe yens henchman is named bart butler lol
Proton is fucked if this article is true, andy is so obviously trying to chase profits in a market that isnt in line with protons core, and there doesnt seem to be anyone with enough company power that is willing to stop his psychosis
He would fit in better with company culture at instagram or tiktok