This was it for me, cancelled my account. Fuck this Andy moron

depends on what and with whom. based on my current jobs with smaller companies and start ups? soon. they can't afford the tech debt they've brought onto themselves. big companies? who knows.

Who Proton???? Nooo come on… who could ever seen this coming?

Over the years I've heard many people claim that proton's servers being in Switzerland is more secure than other EU countries

Things change. They are doing it because Switzerland is proposing legislation that would definitely make that claim untrue.
Europe is no paradise, especially certain countries, but it still makes sense.

From the lumo announcement:

Lumo represents one of many investments Proton will be making before the end of the decade to ensure that Europe stays strong, independent, and technologically sovereign. Because of legal uncertainty around Swiss government proposals(new window) to introduce mass surveillance — proposals that have been outlawed in the EU — Proton is moving most of its physical infrastructure out of Switzerland. Lumo will be the first product to move.

This shift represents an investment of over €100 million into the EU proper. While we do not give up the fight for privacy in Switzerland (and will continue to fight proposals that we believe will be extremely damaging to the Swiss economy), Proton is also embracing Europe and helping to develop a sovereign EuroStack(new window) for the future of our home continent. Lumo is European, and proudly so, and here to serve everybody who cares about privacy and security worldwide.

Where does it say "zero trust" 'on Protons own page'? It does not say "zero-trust" anywhere, it says "zero-access". The data is encrypted at rest, so it is not e2ee. They never mention end-to-end encryption for Lumo, except for ghost mode, and they are talking about the chat once it's complete and you choose to leave it there to use later, not about the prompts you send in.

Zero-access encryption

Your chats are stored using our battle-tested zero-access encryption, so even we can’t read them, similar to other Proton services such as Proton Mail, Proton Drive, and Proton Pass. Our encryption is open source and trusted by over 100 million people to secure their data.

Which means that they are not advertising anything they are not doing or cannot do.

By posting this disinformation all you're achieving is getting people to pedal back to all the shit services out there for "free" because many will start believing that privacy is way harder than it actually is so 'what's the point' or, even worse, no alternative will help me be more private so I might as well just stop trying.

Scribe can be local, if that's what you are referring to.

They also have a specific section on it at https://proton.me/support/proton-scribe-writing-assistant#local-or-server

Also emails for the most part are not e2ee, they can't be because the other party is not using encryption. They use "zero-access" which is different. It means proton gets the email in clear text, encrypts it with your public PGP key, deletes the original, and sends it to you.

See https://proton.me/support/proton-mail-encryption-explained

The email is encrypted in transit using TLS. It is then unencrypted and re-encrypted (by us) for storage on our servers using zero-access encryption. Once zero-access encryption has been applied, no-one except you can access emails stored on our servers (including us). It is not end-to-end encrypted, however, and might be accessible to the sender’s email service.

My friend, I think the confusion stems from you thinking you have deep technical understanding on this, when everything you say demonstrates that you don't.

First off, you don't even know the terminology. A local LLM is one YOU run on YOUR machine.

Lumo apparently runs on Proton servers - where their email and docs all are as well. So I'm not sure what "Their AI is not local!" even means other than you don't know what LLMs do or what they actually are. Do you expect a 32B LLM that would use about a 32GB video card to all get downloaded and ran in a browser? Buddy....just...no.

Look, Proton can at any time MITM attack your email, or if you use them as a VPN, MITM VPN traffic if it feels like. Any VPN or secure email provider can actually do that. Mullvad can, Nord, take your pick. That's just a fact. Google's business model is to MITM attack your life, so we have the counterfactual already. So your threat model needs to include how much do you trust the entity handling your data not to do that, intentionally or letting others through negligence.

There is no such thing as e2ee LLMs. That's not how any of this works. Doing e2ee for the chats to get what you type into the LLM context window, letting the LLM process tokens the only way they can, getting you back your response, and getting it to not keep logs or data, is about as good as it gets for not having a local LLM - which, remember, means on YOUR machine. If that's unacceptable for you, then don't use it. But don't brandish your ignorance like you're some expert, and that everyone on earth needs to adhere to whatever "standards" you think up that seem ill-informed.

Also, clearly you aren't using Proton anyway because if you need to search the text of your emails, you have to process that locally, and you have to click through 2 separate warnings that tell you in all bold text "This breaks the e2ee! Are you REALLY sure you want to do this?" So your complaint about warnings is just a flag saying you don't actually know and are just guessing.

Well, I'm keeping mine. I'm actually very happy with it. This article is full slop, with loads of disinformation, and an evident lack of research. It looks like it was made with some Ai bullshit and the writer didn't even check what that thing vomited.

Switzerland has a surveillance law in the works that will force VPNs, messaging apps, and online platforms to log users' identities, IP addresses, and metadata for government access

I'm just saying Andy sucking up to Trump is a red flag. I'm cancelling in 2026 🫠

Time to face the facts, this utter shit is here to stay, just like every other bit of enshitification we get exposed to.

A local LLM is one YOU run on YOUR machine.

Yes, that is exactly what I am saying. You seem to be confused by basic English.

Look, Proton can at any time MITM attack your email

They are not supposed to be able to and well designed e2ee services can't be. That's the whole point of e2ee.

There is no such thing as e2ee LLMs. That's not how any of this works.

I know. When did I say there is?

So then you object to the premise any LLM setup that isn't local can ever be "secure" and can't seem to articulate that.

What exactly is dishonest here? The language on their site is factually accurate, I've had to read it 7 times today because of you all. You just object to the premise of non-local LLMs and are, IMO, disingenuously making that a "brand issue" because....why? It sounds like a very emotional argument as it's not backed by any technical discussion beyond "local only secure, nothing else."

Beyond the fact that

They are not supposed to be able to and well designed e2ee services can’t be.

So then you trust that their system is well-designed already? What is this cognitive dissonance that they can secure the relatively insecure format of email, but can't figure out TLS and flushing logs for an LLM on their own servers? If anything, it's not even a complicated setup. TLS to the context window, don't keep logs, flush the data. How do you think no-log VPNs work? This isn't exactly all that far off from that.

What exactly is dishonest here? The language on their site is factually accurate, I've had to read it 7 times today because of you all.

I object to how it is written. Yes, technically it is not wrong. But it intentionally uses confusing language and rare technical terminology to imply it is as secure as e2ee. They compare it to proton mail and drive that are supposedly e2ee.

Here's the thing, it kind of already has, the new AI push is related to smaller projects and AI agents like Claude Code and GitHub copilot integration. MCP's are also starting to pick up some steam as a way to refine prompt engineering. The basic AI "bubble" popped already, what we're seeing now is an odd arms race of smaller AI projects thanks to companies like Deepseek pushing the AI hosting costs so low that anyone can reasonably host and tweak their own LLMs without costing a fortune. It's really an interesting thing to watch, but honestly I don't think we're going to see the major gains that the tech industry is trying to push anytime soon. Take any claims of AGI and OpenAI "breakthroughs" with a mountain of salt, because they will do anything to keep the hype up and drive up their stock prices. Sam Altman is a con man and nothing more, don't believe what he says.

They compare it to proton mail and drive that are supposedly e2ee.

Only drive is. Email is not always e2ee, it uses zero-access encryption which I believe is the same exact mechanism used by this chatbot, so the comparison is quite fair tbh.

Proton has my vote for fastest company ever to completely enshittify.