I was using startpage for a while but when using Vpn and searching a lot with it, it suddenly stops working and asks you to fill out a form explaining what you were searching for lmao with your email attached to it or something like that. Given that I wasn’t even looking for anything remotely illegal, I dumped them after the incident.
Protonmail is a little sketch, too. Much of their funding comes from Silicon Valley, and they, in turn, are all in bed with the intelligence services. When it comes to Protonmail, it does sound too good to be true, but they may be the real deal. See: https://www.ic3.gov/Media/Y2021/PSA210115
No one has a perfect track record. However, you’d have to give me more than one example beyond a company that was secretly acquired by the CIA to do that, and that is based in Switzerland. Broadly speaking, I’d rather my data stay in Switzerland than in any other 14 eyes country. Hell, I would even trust the Russians more to store my data than most American companies.
Do you remember when you could pay one dollar a year for WhatsApp? I remember those days. Developers get money to pay for infrastructure, features, upgrades, and services, and people get to keep their privacy. That ended the day FB bought them out. I remember those days. Maybe it is a bit of nostalgia and that’s why I like Threema so much. Signal’s best “selling” point is that it’s free and Snowden shills for it --mind you, Snowden is a former NSA contractor, and let’s not talk about the Signal foundation and their developers… It’s all so damn sketchy! Long live Threema, until proven wrong, of course.
Your post says that Threema doesn’t have voice and video calls, that’s wrong. https://threema.ch/en/blog Feature-wise Threema is very, very solid, and they will soon be adding even more features now that people are in a frenzy about not being spied upon 24/7.
You are echoing some of the thoughts I had when I wrote this:
People should be looking to switch to apps like Threema, or at the very least Telegram. The US has very little power over those apps and can potentially exert a lot of influence over Signal.
Yeah, I think it’s important to point out that I’m not saying that Signal is a bad app or that it doesn’t do what it claims it does. But when it comes to who’s funding these projects, it matters a lot. In contrast, look at telegram, whose main backer is a libertarian semi-anarchist billionaire. He’s been backing up the entire operation for a long time now although they will move into using ads and offering plus services to make it self-sustainable in the future. On that front, I trust Durov more than I would trust Signal coders and people affiliated to the project who, in turn, have ties to the feds in the USA. So all in all, at least in my case, I will be sticking to Threema and Telegram for the foreseeable future.
I’d suggest you try Threema or Telegram. I personally use both but have more trust in Threema overall.
- @kitsunekun to privacy
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- 12d
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They may be sponsored by the US Government, or by cryptographers with ties to the government. …
The most concerning part about ProtonMail/VPN is that their funding came initially from the feds and many big names in Silicon Valley. Would you trust that combination of “donors” sponsoring a service that’s supposed to protect your privacy?
Lookup Mullvad. It’s a great VPN. No gizmos, no bells and whistles, and more importantly: it has been audited frequently and their client is open source.