There are multiple issues with this blog post.

Paints entire issue as “politics”

The post falsely assumes Andy Yen’s politics exclusively matter - they don’t. Andy Yen stupidly posted a opinion online, then stupidly got the official corporate Proton account to stupidly repeat it on multiple platforms.

This is the issue: they demonstrated massive corporate mismanagement.

Then the company tried sweeping it under the rug, and many users are unaware about the corporate statements.

The article never addresses that issue. The author probably wishes Andy Yen’s mistake was just political, because that would be easy to write off. But it’s not.

Trust matters

If the CEO is able to bungle something this badly in full public sight, I lose a tremendous amount of trust in the actual product. And because Proton gets a good chance to read over every single email that comes in from an external source - password reset emails, confidential documents, etc - now I’m worried that they could bungle something that I can’t see… Until it’s too late.

Article misrepresents Slater

If you read this Medium article alone, you might come away with the impression Gail Slater is a champion of small business. After all, it says

Legal experts have described Slater to be “not known as a friend of Big Tech”, and “not good for Google” despite her Republican ties. It is likely that knowing this, Andy was caught by surprise at Trump’s pick…

I was caught by surprise too: this article misses key details about Gail Slater. Several people pointed this out to Andy Yen.

Her Wikipedia page suggests she worked for the FTC before working for a lobbying firm and joining the first Trump administration. Then she worked for Fox and Roku and is now rejoining the Trump administration.

That lobbying group that employed her for four years was the Internet Association.

The Internet Association (IA) was an American lobbying group based in Washington, D.C., which represented companies involved in the Internet. It was founded in 2012 by Michael Beckerman and several companies, including Google, Amazon, eBay, and Facebook…

In 2017, the Internet Association opposed California AB 375, a data privacy bill that would require Internet service providers to obtain customers’ permission to collect and sell their browsing history, citing desensitization and security as the basis for their opposition.

Maybe Andy Yen stupidly didn’t know better when he made his post (as “Proton Team”) when he claimed she had “a solid track record of being on the right side of the antitrust issue”.

But this article should have known.

Technical issues

This article also makes a poor technical assumption: if you read it without knowing better, you’d think Proton isn’t capable of scanning and recording the text of mail as it arrives.

Lines like these

Proton is end-to-end encrypted, meaning it cannot decrypt user data.

tell the reader, either ignorantly or intentionally, the opposite of most email works. Banks, service providers, and password reset emails are all likely to be readable on receipt. E2EE emails in Proton are literally exceptionally rare.

Assorted notes

• This article is the one the Proton team officially endorses. (Or is that Andy Yen commandeering the account again?)
• Assuming racism isn’t possible for Asian people is, at best, a naive thing to say as a defense.
• The article equates women with automatically being feminist; for a paper with so many links, it’s strange that this claim was unsourced

Great article, thanks for sharing.

I think it was ultimately stupid what they did, and how they handled it but this article puts a lot of my uneases at rest.