I was also under the impression that Proton was a non-profit, but learned from the Reject Convenience video linked that they are, in fact, a for-profit company. Not trying to advocate for using or not using it, just sharing my learnings.
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Proton AG is owned by the Proton Foundation which is a non-profit.
Exactly, Proton AG is a for‑profit company that earns revenue through subscriptions.
Proton Foundation is a nonprofit entity that owns a controlling stake in Proton AG. The nonprofit structure is designed to protect the company from being fully acquired by outside investors who might compromise its principles.
So essentially, Proton operates as a for-profit business, but its mission is safeguarded by the nonprofit foundation.
As mentioned in the video, this isn’t the same since it doesn’t require Proton AG to have the same level of transparency.
Again, not saying this is a bad thing, just that it seems to be a common misconception.
It’s like saying Mozilla is a for profit or Wikipedia is a for profit.
Having a for profit company under the non profit ownership is just to ease bureaucracy.
This doesn’t change the fact that the ultimate owner is the foundation and so there is no shareholder to pressure etc.
A counter argument to this could have been exploring the OpenAI case and how it’s trying to get out of the no profit model. But for some reason privacy YouTubers never make that much research into stuff… Almost like they are just earning on that engagement that you get when not being boringly nuanced :)
The YouTuber also states that 9 privacy policies are bad and tbh Proton could probably unify some of them but the thing is that they are actually different: they said in the past, for example, that privacy laws for VPNs in Switzerland are better than those for emails, so it’s pretty ok to have 2 different privacy policies (I wonder if they could at least unifiy drive, mail calendar ones). Google can have just one because it’s simply “we gather as much data as we can” for every service they have.
For both of the other organizations you mentioned there is financial transparency ~ something that proton lacks.
The public records from the companies that sell stocks are not so useful anyway.
Obviously I’d prefer to know more about Proton spending, but the examples made in the video like “I want to know how much proton has spent on that YouTube ad” are just impossible. You can open an Apple shareholders report and check it yourself.
Still, I’d rather have no capitalism rather than capitalism + financial transparency reports. One day they will sue you if you don’t pursuit more profit. Not gonna happen with foundations.
edit: I misread the comment and answered like you were referring to openai and google and not mozilla and wikipedia, sorry
What gave you that impression? It’s a company like all the others.
The many, admittedly third party articles saying they are non profit.
I have never seen any articles like this. And the CEO praising Trump should have been a hint.
There’s nothing wrong with making a profit off software.
To be clear, there’s a difference in terminology of profit in economic context vs colloquial. When they say profit / non-profit, non-profit doesn’t mean that people don’t make money for their work. Rather it refers to what’s done with the extra money made above the costs of the firm, after it’s paid its employees and officers. Is it given to the firm’s shareholders, is it reinvested into the firm, are prices reduced to have less excess the next quarter, etc.
