Not sure if that counts as proper evidence, but I have seen some logs[0] albeit with encryption but from my understanding, they control the encryption keys or atleast certainly have the ability to change (if they get hacked themselves for example)
Would you like to see a proper evidence of the logging policy? I feel like I can try finding that again if you/HN community would be interested to see that.
Edit: also worth pointing out that keeping logs with time might be a form of meta-data, which depending on your threat-vector (journalism etc.) can be very sensitive info.
I'd like to see any kind of evidence that there's any substance of in these accusations of services not actually being private - not just theoretical theorycrafting about mechanisms.
And how does that compare to other services we have available and people actually use.
At some point, essentially everyone has to trust the product and more importantly, the company/the people in the company. Firstly its worth clarifying that there isn't really something akin to zero-trust in such cases. Thus the theoretical theorycrafting about mechanisms. Those show that you have to trust proton
Now, My issue with proton is that, they try to appear transparent but a lot of what they've done especially with proton meet seems to sometimes even be misleading. If they couldn't create EU/Swiss sovereign infrastructure for meet, then why are they using Cloud-act providers while within the same post talking about the implications of Cloud Act. There is some great irony in all of this and this is what is making me suspicious and how Proton seems to be misleading people rather than leading them towards more privacy.
At some point, it raises atleast some questions about trusting proton.
> And how does that compare to other services we have available and people actually use.
That depends on what service are you talking about from, Do you want a whole eco-system or are you happy with individual apps/companies focusing on one thing in a more unix-fashion of things.
Do you prefer non-profits or for-profit companies to handle such infrastructure?
How familiar you are with self-hosting and what is your threat vector?
Are you a corporate or a person yourself and what are your budget of things?
but just to give a pointer without asking these questions, Some good pointers are posteo.de, tutanota, infomaniak (has whole ecosystem) Within the calling system, I personally used to use fairmeeting.net, it used to have screen sharing option for free as well but looks like they might have paywalled it recently. You can find multiple jitsi community instances.
I feel like the only way to answer this question is if people ask with more depth. The threat model differs for everybody, for some people (like journalists), even just this proton meet fiasco is enough for them to reconsider proton ecosystem as a whole and consider it too threatening, especially with recent incidents and their lives being on the line. You might say, well where might they go and I feel like they might go to disroot (non-profit activism oriented) or tutanota or even posteo.de depending on what they might prefer.
I'm indirectly involved / hear about a project that buys up old feature phones, mainly from Japan, to try and find ones that have data for old imode games on them, notably a FFVII spinoff called Before Crisis. It's difficult because they would release the game in separate data packs, the idea being people can remove data packs for parts of the game they already played to save space (also a feature on modern smartphone games). But since the servers are long gone, they need to find phones with the data on them to extract it.
So many (perceived) problems with spaceflight and building moon bases and the like are solved by simply making the process and cost of launching faster, easier and cheaper; the problem that NASA has always had is that each launch, even with the reusable space shuttles, cost billions and took years of engineering, planning, etc. To the point where yesterday's launch was done with (what I perceive to be) salvaged parts where the engineering was done decades ago, because engineering something new would be too expensive and take too long.
Sure, don't fix what isn't broken and all - *nix tools are decades old too after all - but still.
A better question would probably what they don't do; just going off the wiki page (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM) for recent history, they're in health care (imaging), weather, video streaming, cloud services, Red Hat, managed infrastructure (which branched off into a company called Kyndryl, which has 90.000 employees in 115 countries), warfare ("In June 2025, IBM was named by a UN expert report as one of several companies "central to Israel's surveillance apparatus and the ongoing Gaza destruction.""), etc etc etc.
Basically they do a lot, but they're not showy about it.
> warfare ("In June 2025, IBM was named by a UN expert report as one of several companies "central to Israel's surveillance apparatus and the ongoing Gaza destruction."")
Until around 2000-2004 there have even been 2 Antennas. The whole surrounding forest is a military training ground, obviously used by German Bundeswehr and US forces. There are German and US barracks on opposite ends of the area. Within the vicinity there are an UXO clearance service, K9 school, CQB training village, shooting ranges, lots of bunkers and who knows what.
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