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Posted by dbushell 1/23/2026

Proton spam and the AI consent problem(dbushell.com)
557 points | 428 commentspage 6
CMYKninja 1/24/2026|
I envy the person who has the energy to care so much while the world burns around us.
alex_young 1/23/2026||
This is some fine wine.

I want to get x, y, and z marketing email but not w.

They sent me something consider w. Outrage!

uhfraid 1/23/2026|
This is what’s called a “customer complaint” at real businesses with real paying customers lol
gingerlime 1/23/2026||
I’ve had a similar experience when signing up for Office365 and started getting promotional emails to CoPilot. These (2) emails were without an unsubscribe option.

I contacted MS support and after some back n forth they claimed it was a transactional email that doesn’t require consent or opt out.

Clearly promotional and not necessary but they won’t listen.

I’m in the process of filing GDPR + ePrivacy complaints, but it’s a tedious process, unlikely to do anything.

redbell 1/23/2026||
Here we are! Day after day, I realize that even smaller tech companies suffer from or could not resist the temptation of Enshittification[1] once they start gaining some momentum. I feel this path had became inevitable since everybody is doing this, at scale. I barely could recall some names that stuck to their original motto over time.

____________________

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification

direwolf20 1/23/2026|
You do what makes money, or you are eliminated from the game. Such is life in capitalism.
mtlmtlmtlmtl 1/23/2026||
I'm so fed up with Proton. I will be taking my business elsewhere. Instead of making a great product for X, they've decided to make a series of extremely mediocre products for P, Q, X, Y, Z and W, all of which are left missing the most basic features for years. Features which even the free alternatives already have. Things like supporting unicode in email headers without having to use punycode, creating mailboxes from sieve filters and a bunch of other sieve expansions, and decent, portable, non-bugridden integration with email clients. Protondrive has such dogshit speeds it's basically completely useless. The nat-pmp support on their vpn servers is very strange, and it took me a couple weeks to craft a script that could handle all of its idiosyncrasies, none of which are documented. I haven't even bothered trying their calendar, password manager, or the Yet Another AI Service they keep sending me upselling emails for. I don't need any of those things, but I'm sure they have similarly lacklustre feature parity.

Doesn't help that when i notify them about these things, their support people just gaslight me. "I've notified our development team about this". Then nothing happens. I told them about the speed issue with protondrive when it was new, that was years ago now. Still not fixed, no updates, nada.

I will be moving to something like fastmail, plus some other vpn service, since those are the only two products of theirs I'm actually using. It seems like I'll get a far better product in both cases for almost half the overall cost.

cwillu 1/23/2026||
Implementing this sort of “functionality” is always the department of a junior team, so that the obvious sorts of questions about defaults can be answered with “a junior dev was responsible for the implementation and messed up”, even though the mess up was by design.
tsylba 1/23/2026||
This make me think of the GitHub spamming issue.

See, my GitHub email is not my main address, and when I got some it's either from a user of one of my repository or from a marketing team that extracted thousand of address from starred repositories to fake genuine email with my name and all.

The things is, it's always a less than stellar product. It started with NFTs, calm down for a bit and now came back with a vengeance with AI startups.

I guess it's a number game for them but I can't comprehend their lack of value, same for those peoples that subscribes to everyone just to gain a sub back (and judging by the number, a lot of people sub back without thinking about it, so it works).

Damn I despise that marketing-bussiness hellscape that the internet slowly morphed into along the years. We can't have nice things because there will always be a prominent proportion of us that would exploit it for personal gain and we would do collectively nothing against it, for the name of liberal economic or something. And forward the enshitification goes.

ZebusJesus 1/24/2026||
considering lumo never gets the decryption password for my data, Im not nearly as worried about Protons AI vs googles default I will read your email.
Quothling 1/23/2026|
Lumo will likely be the thing that moves me away from Proton. I've been pretty happy with it, ever since they made the photo's app actually have shareable libraries it's been just as good as any other Google Mail/Photos/Files thing I've used. The password manager plugin for firefox isn't as good as bitwarden, but when you're paying it's part of the package so... If I have to encrypt my files before I use the drive, and they continue to build their AI spy into everything, though, then what is the point really?

Anyway, it is sort of hilarious to report Proton as spam to Proton.

TonyStr 1/23/2026||
It's bewildering to see privacy-focused companies like Proton and DDG jump on the AI train. I guess privacy is just a vehicle for attracting early adopters, and all those principles fall apart once their user base becomes large enough.
fundatus 1/23/2026||
What's the issue with a privacy-focused AI assistant that doesn't store all your data?
xigoi 1/24/2026|||
The marketing spam, as mentioned in the article.
direwolf20 1/23/2026|||
And completely optional.
neobrain 1/23/2026||
> I've been pretty happy with it, ever since they made the photo's app actually have shareable libraries it's been just as good as any other Google Mail/Photos/Files thing I've used.

Glad to hear you found a service that's useful to you!

> If I have to encrypt my files before I use the drive, and they continue to build their AI spy into everything, though, then what is the point really?

That would be concerning indeed, but there is no such integration today and it seems unlikely they would integrate non-local models into drive. Even on the mail side, any use of LLMs is optional, opt-in, and limited to text production (i.e. no training on your inbox).

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