I've been using Proton Mail and VPN for a while now, and I'm just wondering how everyone else feels about them. I have this kind of inherent alight distrust of them just because they seem like they offer a lot for free and kind of have a Big Tech vibe about them, but there's nothing for me to really substantiate that distrust with, its mostly just a feeling. That being said, I do use their services as mentioned and they work pretty well, even on the free teir. So aside from that one instance where they gave that guy's info to the feds, is there any reason not to trust them with my data?
Are you referring to email?
I thought it was obvious from the context but ues
In that case, the email provider that you use makes little difference at all. Because of the way that email works, it will always be visible in plain text (unless manually encrypted through PGP) by a third party other than the recipient at some point. There is of course the exception of, for example, direct communication happening between two Proton Mail accounts, but this is really hardly worth mentioning in any practical sense.
The long and short of it is that email should never be used for secure communications.