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we appear to be the first to write up the outrage coherently too. much thanks to the illustrious @self

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[-] fasterandworse@awful.systems 18 points 5 months ago

it all stinks so much. He calls it "opt-in" but the official description of that opt-in is:

If you try to use Proton Scribe, you will be prompted to chose between local and server-side. So, technically, it's not active until you decide how, and if, you want to use it.

as you can see here: https://mastodon.social/@protonprivacy/112807462045101580

there is opt-in and then there is dangling an expired hotdog

[-] self@awful.systems 13 points 5 months ago

holy fuck that’s worse than I thought

so going back to not being able to recommend Proton to anyone again: there’s now a button (and associated “tutorial” advertising modals trying to get the user to click the button, don’t pretend there won’t be) that when clicked gives the user a confusing choice between an option that might not work and one that exfiltrates their data and claims it doesn’t (if they even get this choice on a computer that doesn’t support the local LLM), and if they interact with that it just opts them into the feature in a state that may or may not (but by default does) expose the plaintext of their messages to Proton’s servers

and I’m supposed to recommend this horseshit to non-technical users? what’s that sound like, I wonder? “oh it’s a great privacy-oriented mail service you should pay for — but not for your business because you might fuck up and exfiltrate your data, and also there’s a chance they’ll enable the same feature for regular users at some unspecified time in the future so look out for that. oh and don’t get visionary either.” yeah fuck that

this post was submitted on 18 Jul 2024
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