This simply isn’t really possible.

Even if they published open-source code for their backend, it wouldn’t prove that it’s actually what their systems are running.

And when you are storing your data on their servers, and decrypting it by sending over your password, there’s no way you can actually truly prevent them from accessing your data, if they were to modify how their systems function overall. (this is true for every company)

Even if they were using zero-knowledge proofs to verify and prove to you the computation done on the server matched what would be expected from published open-source code, then either their very own systems (and by extension, their administrators), or a different company’s proprietary TPM module, would be the root of trust for those ZK proofs, and would still have the same underlying trust assumptions of at least 1 company having the ability to potentially steal your information.

If you want to rail against Proton for this, you have to be against every single cloud-based instance of code that hosts encrypted data, by any company, for any user.

Saying Proton acts just like Microsoft is a laughable comparison to make in order to justify claiming a lack of privacy or security on Proton’s part.

Why? Is it because they’re both companies that offer online services? Guess what, loads of companies do that. But you know what Proton doesn’t do? Give away the contents of people’s files, like Microsoft states they do in their own transparency reports, that they conveniently stopped publishing in 2022. Microsoft handed over the content (not just IP, email, etc, but actual docs, communications, stored files, etc) of thousands of people’s accounts to law enforcement. Proton hasn’t given out content once.

And this doesn’t even consider the fact that Proton’s business model is privacy. For Microsoft, their users will keep using their services regardless of their privacy, but for Proton, if it comes out that their services are no longer private, nobody will use them anymore, because nobody who got them for privacy would need them at that point.

I haven’t had a single issue with crashes, noise, heat, display, etc.

The positioning/gaps of the spacers are extremely tiny, and barely noticeable, and the only issue I’ve had so far has been my laptop not turning off fully when I shut it down, but that’s fixed by just holding down the power button.

Oh, and I’m running an unsupported linux distro, (NixOS) so it’s not like I’m starting from any advantaged position in terms of software integration.

Performance is great, cooling is great, games run well and it boots up quickly. Nothing much else to say other than it’s a good laptop.

The best (worst) part is that they almost always just point you to the ways that you can already request your credit report and monitoring for free from the credit bureaus. 🥲

True that. We have the means to fix so many problems, we just have a very very very small few that reeeeally don’t like to do anything good with their money, and instead choose to hoard it, at the expense of everyone else.