I’ll second Proton. It sucks to have to pay for services again to have something that matches the generous free shit that we got before… but seems those wild west days of the internet, unless you were grandfathered on or have to give up a lot of info in return… are now long gone.
If you’re not paying for a service, then you’re the product. I never understood the expectation that people should just provide you email and storage for free, because?
This saying is actually horseshit, though. The profit motive and infinite growth model of capitalism guarantees that even if you are paying for a product, your data and attention — everything that can be — will be monetized eventually.
The saying should be “if the service isn’t open-source and E2E encrypted, you’re the product”
It should be noted, though, that the “if you aren’t paying, you’re the product” mantra isn’t always true. FOSS exists.
And I know that seems obvious to anybody reading this on Lemmy, but I’ve had people refuse to use good open source software because they fundamentally refuse to trust something being provided to them for free.
You can also feel good about supporting Proton. They are literally bootstrapped as a service and only rely on what we pay them. They never took any money from vc or other sources.
If you have more than one person who should/would/could move over to Proton, they have a family plan and every so often they bring back their visionary plan which is a better version of the family.
Proton, has email, cloud storage and VPN services.
I’ll second Proton. It sucks to have to pay for services again to have something that matches the generous free shit that we got before… but seems those wild west days of the internet, unless you were grandfathered on or have to give up a lot of info in return… are now long gone.
If you’re not paying for a service, then you’re the product. I never understood the expectation that people should just provide you email and storage for free, because?
This saying is actually horseshit, though. The profit motive and infinite growth model of capitalism guarantees that even if you are paying for a product, your data and attention — everything that can be — will be monetized eventually.
The saying should be “if the service isn’t open-source and E2E encrypted, you’re the product”
It should be noted, though, that the “if you aren’t paying, you’re the product” mantra isn’t always true. FOSS exists.
And I know that seems obvious to anybody reading this on Lemmy, but I’ve had people refuse to use good open source software because they fundamentally refuse to trust something being provided to them for free.
You can also feel good about supporting Proton. They are literally bootstrapped as a service and only rely on what we pay them. They never took any money from vc or other sources.
If you have more than one person who should/would/could move over to Proton, they have a family plan and every so often they bring back their visionary plan which is a better version of the family.