I’ve been a subscriber to Proton Mail for over 4 years now, but I won’t be renewing my subscription, which is coming up in the next couple of months. Like many subscribers my primary interest was to make my email more secure and private than I would get with other providers, but the company’s CEO sees this interest in security and privacy as “loser thinking”.
So, why would I spend more money in a service that has now decided to abandon the principles which are the entire reason why I subscribed in the past? And for what? for AI vibe-coding. A serious, leading product is literally being turned to shit. Well Andy, you can pay for slop out of your own pocket. You’ve lost my money, and that of thousands of other subscribers.
That’s the cost of arrogance and greed. Another reason to abandon the project is that employees have been summoned to “re-interview” on their AI skills to keep their existing jobs, which frankly sounds like a fancy way of expressing “constructive dismissal”, a process by which an employer hounds employees into quitting. That’s just a downright scummy thing to do, and as someone who’s spent the entire year looking for employment I am absolutely disgusted by this move. Yes, those “re-interviews” have been cancelled — as a result of public backlash. If Andy Yen thinks that this is enough to keep me as a customer, he’s got another thing coming. Only his resignation from the company could even get me to reconsider at this point. He is not someone that can be trusted.
And trust is what Proton used to have. It was the selling point. It’s not so much that I’m quitting Proton — it is Proton and its CEO that have quit my patronage.