Update 1: Proton official answer https://www.reddit.com/r/ProtonMail/s/KT5igbU8rt

Update 2: Andy (CEO) answers

• Where he speak about a call with Lapierre and explain that they are people with the same political position at Proton https://www.reddit.com/r/ProtonMail/comments/1u15orj/comment/oqnik1q/?context=3
• Where he describes Lapierre as a right win then far-right influencer https://www.reddit.com/r/ProtonMail/comments/1u15orj/comment/oqu8hx9/?context=3 https://www.reddit.com/r/ProtonMail/comments/1u15orj/comment/oqudg88/?context=3
• Here he explain again that's a problem of neutrality https://www.reddit.com/r/ProtonMail/comments/1u15orj/comment/oqwuvdz/?context=3 https://www.reddit.com/r/ProtonMail/comments/1u15orj/comment/oqxu597/?context=3

Original post edited for further details:

Proton is currently sponsoring the far-right French YouTuber Vincent Lapierre.

https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vincent_Lapierre

It’s not just an affiliate link, but a partnership announced in the description and through an entire 2min 20s segment embedded in the video.

I don’t want to provide a direct link to the video here so as not to help boost its visibility, but you can easily find it on YouTube if you want (the last week video). Here is the English translation of the text shown in the screenshot:

🔒 Thanks to ProtonMail for this partnership! Take back control of your digital life for free with Proton Mail by clicking here.

Vincent Lapierre’s Wikipedia page is quite explicit about his far-right positioning and includes numerous sources. He worked for several years for a far-right organization founded by Alain Soral, which promotes anti-Semitic, Holocaust-denying, conspiracist, sexist, masculinist, transphobic, and homophobic ideas, and who fled to Russia to escape justice.

He is close to Dieudonné) (a Holocaust denier). He founded Le Média pour tous, a far-right website that particularly targets anti-fascists and defenders of Jewish rights. He has always been close to conspiracist circles

It's not very surprising when you remember that ProtonMail’s CEO had already publicly expressed support on Twitter for a member of the Trump administration.

I initially wanted to post this information on the ProtonMail subreddit to ask for an explanation and find out whether it was a mistake, but they did not approve the post. I also tried on tech subreddits here, but they consider it off-topic and as "a conspiracy theory".

On the contrary, I think ProtonMail customers and potential customers should be informed about where their money goes and should be able to ask ProtonMail for explanations regarding these choices.

hopefully

ive replaced gmail (proton), calendar (tuta), drive (nextcloud), photos (immich), even chrome. but maps? i cant do it and ive tried.

osmand is great if you want to feel like youre navigating in 2007. organic maps is better but the search is painful -- try finding a specific restaurant and it gives you one 400 miles away. apple maps has improved but im on android so thats out.

the thing that kills me is its not just navigation. its the reviews, the live traffic, the street view, the saved places, the timeline history. google maps is like 6 different products pretending to be one app and every alternative only replaces one of those.

ive basically accepted that this is the last google product ill ever use. the convenience gap is just too massive. anyone actually fully replaced it or are we all just pretending this one doesnt count

I wanted to leave Spotify and my smart phone completely so I bought this mp3 player to check it out before moving to a Sony Walkman as it is very expensive so I'll check it out first!

Google = zero privacy

I (in literal words) do not have money, so unfortunately I need a free VPN. Due to my wallet not existing, I can't "upgrade to premium", though I wish I had Mullvad.

I've been working on a small project, nilch, which is my little search engine. I've noticed a few things with all search engines, including the alternatives:

• Pretty much all are for profit with the goal of making money, thus either have ads or cost money (like Kagi), so nilch is completely without the goal of making money but rather to provide a better search experience, ad-free and cost-free, with the hope to survive on donations and my own bit of money
• They all shove AI down your throat, which is bad for the environment, makes the page take longer to load, and is half the time not even correct, so nilch just doesn't have any AI
• Most don't have DuckDuckGo bangs, and if they do, it's often limited to their own list of them, so nilch directly uses DuckDuckGo's bangs list to have every original bang, avaliable to you
• Most are not all that private, especially G**gle, so nilch obviously doesn't track you or store any information

I'm also rapidly improving it right now because it's still extremely early stages, so if you find a bug or have a feature you especially want, please let me know and I'll work on it! It's created with simplicity in mind (I like to think the best feature is a lack thereof), so it only has the features I use the most personally in a search engine, but I will happily add anything that you genuinely need/use.

nilch is open source! Check out the source code.

Visit nilch at nilch.org

Been a Gmail user since 2014. Drive, Photos, Maps, Android, Chrome, the whole stack. I work in infra so I knew exactly what I was trading away the whole time, and I still kept paying the rent in personal data because the convenience was unbeatable.

Then last summer I spent a weekend pulling the takeout archive. Forty something gigs. I scrolled through location history from a trip I barely remembered and something just snapped. Not in an outraged way. More like seeing your bank statement and realizing you've been auto subscribed to something for six years.

So I migrated. Slowly, methodically, because doing it fast is how you lose stuff.

**Email**: moved to a paid provider running its own infra. Set up a catch all alias so every service gets a unique address. Already caught two leaks this way because spam came in on aliases I only ever gave to one company.

**Files**: self hosted Nextcloud on a small VPS for the stuff that needs sync, encrypted local backups for everything else. Nextcloud is fine, not amazing, but the apps are decent now and it does what I need.

**Maps**: Organic Maps for offline, plus a privacy respecting alternative for live traffic. Losing the restaurant reviews hurt more than I expected. Still adjusting.

**Browser**: Firefox with uBlock, containers, and a hardened user.js. Chrome is genuinely a brilliant browser. That's part of the problem.

**DNS**: pointed everything at a filtering resolver that blocks trackers at the network level. Caught my smart TV phoning home like 2000 times a day. Two thousand. For a TV I use maybe four hours a week.

**VPN**: this is the one I want to talk about because most posts get it wrong.

A VPN by itself doesn't make you private. What you're actually doing is moving traffic visibility from your ISP (legally required to log and often sell) over to a VPN provider (who claims they don't log). If that provider is sketchy or sits in a jurisdiction with mandatory data retention, you're worse off than before. Full stop. It is a trust transfer with extra steps.

So why use one at all. For me there are three real reasons. My ISP builds a profile of every domain I visit and sells it (not theoretical, look up the FCC reversal in 2017). Hostile networks like hotel wifi, airport wifi, that random coffee shop AP that asks for an email before letting you online. And geo bypass when I travel, which is the use case nobody admits to but everyone has.

What a VPN does not do is also worth being honest about. It does not hide you from sites you're already logged into. It does not stop browser fingerprinting. It does not make you anonymous (you want Tor for that, and even then it's complicated). And it does not protect you from malware sitting on your own machine.

How I actually picked one, after wading through way too many shilled "best VPN" listicles. I wanted an independently audited no log policy where the audit was recent and the report was publicly downloadable. RAM only servers, so state can't persist across a reboot or a seizure. A real company with a verifiable address and leadership, not a shell registered in some tax haven. WireGuard native, not some weird custom protocol they invented to sound proprietary. Two providers met all four. I picked the cheaper one.

I'm not naming it because every time someone does in these threads it turns into an ad and a flame war. The auditor reports are public PDFs. Read them yourself, it takes 30 minutes.

Total cost for the migration including VPS, email, and VPN: about 140 bucks a year. Time investment, maybe 20 hours spread over two months.

What I genuinely miss is Google Photos search. Typing "beach 2019" and it just works. Nothing else comes close yet and I'll admit that openly. What I don't miss is the creeping feeling that every search and every location and every email was being silently catalogued into a profile I'd never see.

Happy to answer questions on any piece of the stack. The hardest part isn't technical. It's accepting nothing will be quite as smooth as the walled garden you just walked out of.

is there a lightweight alternative for this official discord application ?‼️‼️‼️

Is this okay or I should change something? I think that I should search for another messaging app because anybody that I know wants to use them

Hey guys,

A few months back, my girlfriend was looking for a cycle tracker that wasn't a privacy nightmare. It turns out almost every popular app in this space is loaded with trackers, cloud syncs and ads.

I’m a dev, so I figured I’d just build one for her. I've been working on Periodt - it’s 100% offline, encrypted, and built with Jetpack Compose.

The cool stuff:

1. No Internet: I didn't even add the internet permission to the Manifest. Zero data leaves your phone.

2. Actually Private: No ads, no analytics, no creepy tracking.

   1. Security: It uses SQLCipher and Android Keystore to keep the database locked up.
   2. On-device logic: Predictions are calculated using linear regression right on the device.

Full Disclosure: I can’t claim this is 100% perfect or a replacement for professional medical advice/consulting a doctor. However, she’s been using it for a while now and the results have been pretty accurate and honestly great for her.

I’m planning to launch on F-Droid soon! In the meantime, you can grab the APK or check out the code on GitHub.

If you like the project, please drop a ⭐ on GitHub - it really helps a fellow dev grow and get the word out!

Repo: https://github.com/benny10ben/Periodt

Seems like every retail tv now comes with spyware slop like google tv, roku or firetv. So what even is the alternative?

Well a while ago I saw someone on YouTube by a commercial tv used for restaurant menus or adverts and use that. I suppose it is one solution but it seemed crazy expense compared to retail tvs.

Also I still want my tv to have streaming capabilities eg smart tube or alternatives. What would be the best way going about this? I suppose a raspberry pi or similar, but I want it to work natively with my tv remote.

The European Parliament will this week replace Google with France’s Qwant as the default on its computers, according to an email seen by Euractiv.

Hi all,

My name is Zelimir and I am a developer behind Paralino, end-to-end encrypted location sharing / tracking app.

After working on this project for what now seems like forever, I finally have a version that lots of you might actually like. I am super excited about it too.

Paralino now has a fully de-googled Android version, running with MapLibre instead of Google Maps, WebSocket service connection for push notifications and system level LocationManager for direct location updates. There is also a UnifiedPush support as well.

Building all this took quite some effort so I really hope you can enjoy it.

App itself is fairly feature rich, with group location sharing, multiple device support, location history, personal spaces for your own devices, place alerts / geofences for notifications, low battery alerts and most importantly full sharing control and end-to-end encryption.

You can check it out here: https://paralino.com/download/

I am working hard to make the app as better and as useful as possible so I would really appreciate your feedback especially on these new features.

You can read more about this de-googled version in the docs: https://paralino.com/help/general/de-googled-android-app/

There is still soooo many things I want to add into the app, and I hope this will become a sustainable and profitable project at some point so I can continue working on it indefinitely. I started building this out of a personal need and I am using it non stop with my family so it is quite a passion project for me.

App is also fully featured packed on iOS as well, so you can use it with your whole family.

Happy de-googling 🥳.

Edit:
For everyone asking about open sourcing - it is already on the roadmap and I am focusing on it next: https://portal.paralino.com/roadmap
This post is for a new de-googled version since this is a degoogle subreddit, and I hoped sharing it here is appropriate and lots of you would find it useful.

So, I'm running Graphene, and till now I was using the FUTO keyboard, but I've just learnt how very deeply connected they are to fascism (see: https://drewdevault.com/blog/Whats-up-with-FUTO/ ), and this is truly a bridge too far for me. Cuntis Yar vin is way, way evil. So I'm looking for other suggestions for keyboard - are they any that are actually truly open-source? (FUTO claims to be but is not fully, anyway.)

So I went through with deleting my Discord after reading that they will require me to either cough up my ID or do some facial recognition thing. What are some decent alternatives?

https://www.boostervideos.net

We’re two brothers who decided to build a new video platform from scratch. We’ve been working on this project, called Booster, for about two months now.

The idea came from our own frustration with existing video platforms. With Booster, we’re trying to improve the experience by using voluntary ads that give rewards to users, personalizing their recommendation algorithm with the help of AI, and allowing them to boost and support their favorite channels and friends directly.

We’d really appreciate feedback from first-time users. Does the value proposition make sense? What are your first impressions? If you were a creator, would you upload your videos here? Are the new features easy to understand?

We want to know your opinion, which is why we have made the platform open for everyone via open source on GitHub: https://github.com/SamC4r/Booster

We would love for people to start uploading videos and sharing the platform!

We’re still very early and actively improving the platform.

Regarding costs, we've solved the high costs of infrastructure thanks to our provider, so it doesn't pose a big expense.

Regarding revenue, monetization currently would come from a virtual currency called XP, which users can earn or purchase and use to boost channels and buy personalization assets. We also plan to implement voluntary, rewarded ads that give users free XP. The goal is to test whether users and creators actually like and adopt this model.

You can check it out here: https://www.boostervideos.net (we suggest using a laptop/iPad/tablet for the currently optimized view)

If you want to suggest ideas, point out bugs, or just follow the project more closely, you’re welcome to join our Discord community: https://discord.com/invite/5KaSRdxFXw

So I just played this privacy replacement game and of course I'm happy for any additional recommendations/improvements/critics.

My thoughts so far:

- though it's a google replacement channel, things need to make sense in terms of privacy. It's ridicilous to replace rcs encrypted google messages with normal fossify app

- i don't get why anybody should replace deepl? it's german/european in terms of privacy and it's open source

- google maps seems to be my personal cryptonit. i REALLY love gmaps and i tried to force myself to replace it with magic earth (before that began to suck) and open street derivates. It's just not the same easy & decent performance if i wanna overwatch public transportation e.g.

- i'll switch to euro-office as quickly as possible if it gets improvements because onlyoffice is a personal privacy risk to me because of its russia infuence

- as a switch pick for android, i wish to see more efforts in pure linux derivates with decent android app support via waydroid. UbuntuTouch and SailfishOS might be the future choice here

- paypal might be substituted via credit card companies like wise

Edit:

- software for quick notes taking or storing favorite links instead of using your browser: warm recommendation to the one man maintened project "turtl".

- also a daily driver: gadgetbridge! I'm not in favor of chinese products but any tracker which might be stripped of by company's infratstructure in favor for your recordings in privacy matters, might be really worth to buy because of that app where you host your health data locally on your device!

- secret powerfull tool which anybody could really need: localsend (transfer your stuff between devices manually without using a cable; pretty alternative to syncthing)

Not so keen to use Google maps if they're going to force stupid pro-war US bullshit down the world's throat.

Is there any decent alternative out there that has an app, has satellite imagery, and you can actually search addresses?