An incredibly interesting video about how he was approached by Proton, and they were willing to give him an associate link worth $70 per sign up. Given most people might just have the mail plus or similar package, that doesn’t exceed $70, are they looking for people that will go to a higher package for more services, or looking at getting you into their ecosystem to stick around for years? And he’s making the point that these tech YouTubers promoting services are compromised. They’re directly incentivized to hype the products so they can get more money, and as they see that money come in, they become even more biased turning into salesmen for the entity. And perhaps the high fee per sign up is more about corrupting the “influencer” than what they will make per signup, as perception that spreads along with people signing up on their own is greater than those that would use the link. And Proton is run by a non-profit foundation, so not your typical corporate entity with for profit practices.
Currently, I just signed up for their black Friday Proton Mail Plus deal for a little over $20 paid in Bitcoin for the first year, which also included Simplelogin, though I had the free versions previously. I added my own domain for email aliases, so I can roll individual email aliases to services, e.g. amazon@domain.com for Amazon. So if I see SPAM, phishing and scam emails roll into one of those email addresses, I can disable or block them and know that entity was compromised or sold my email. Consequently, now I have a question mark next to Proton which will have me keep a closer eye on their foundation and any news as to what they’re up to. And it’s certainly possible that the OCGFC capture foundations by taking over the board, as we’ve seen with several opensource, free software projects, with IBM and Red Hat leading the way.
Worth pointing out, I wouldn’t use too many of their services like he suggested. I’ll stick with Proton Mail, Simplelogin and their Proton Authenticator app for now. But, I use Mullvad VPN for VPN as they’re very reputable for privacy and have exceptional features payable in privacy Bitcoin Lightning or Monero crypto, with Bitwarden for a password manager which I just switched to and find to be extremely good, with a great extension and Android app, opensource…