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Proton Mail goes AI, security-focused userbase goes ‘what on earth’ (pivot-to-ai.com)
submitted 2 years ago by [M] to c/techtakes@awful.systems
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we appear to be the first to write up the outrage coherently too. much thanks to the illustrious @self

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[–] 23 points 2 years ago* (1 child)

not sure how legit that account is, actually. It's not the one I @'ed - this one was created in Jan 2024 - either it's his low-key alt or a bot

perhaps his plausible deniability account.

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  • [–] 19 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    do you get banned from twitter if you call him a fucking asshole?

    I’m working on a more detailed reply on mastodon but to be honest, I’m pretty sure he didn’t read the original post

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  • [–] 18 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    it all stinks so much. He calls it "opt-in" but the official description of that opt-in is:

    If you try to use Proton Scribe, you will be prompted to chose between local and server-side. So, technically, it's not active until you decide how, and if, you want to use it.

    as you can see here: https://mastodon.social/@protonprivacy/112807462045101580

    there is opt-in and then there is dangling an expired hotdog

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  • [–] 14 points 2 years ago

    holy fuck that’s worse than I thought

    so going back to not being able to recommend Proton to anyone again: there’s now a button (and associated “tutorial” advertising modals trying to get the user to click the button, don’t pretend there won’t be) that when clicked gives the user a confusing choice between an option that might not work and one that exfiltrates their data and claims it doesn’t (if they even get this choice on a computer that doesn’t support the local LLM), and if they interact with that it just opts them into the feature in a state that may or may not (but by default does) expose the plaintext of their messages to Proton’s servers

    and I’m supposed to recommend this horseshit to non-technical users? what’s that sound like, I wonder? “oh it’s a great privacy-oriented mail service you should pay for — but not for your business because you might fuck up and exfiltrate your data, and also there’s a chance they’ll enable the same feature for regular users at some unspecified time in the future so look out for that. oh and don’t get visionary either.” yeah fuck that

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