The problem is the gap between marketing promises and realities. Proton markets itself as a safe Swiss product[0] for activists[1], but the reality is their accounts often expose more than a casual user may expect, like a secondary email address[2] (often required to sign up) or payment info[3]. The Swissness is even more suspect according to this article, if it's true that they rely so heavily on American infrastructure and don't responsibly disclose this even in their privacy policy.

[0]: https://proton.me/blog/switzerland

[1]: https://proton.me/blog/protesters-free-speech

[2]: https://www.theregister.com/2024/05/13/infosec_in_brief/

[3]: https://slashdot.org/story/453084

This seems unreasonable. The entire point of Proton is that they themselves cannot access your data, that's how I've seen it advertised. The Swiss thing is more just that they can't be compelled to enable logging. (To be fair, though, maybe that's changed. it's been a while since I saw their home page and I don't exactly make a habit of disabling my adblock).

But I don't see how any reasonable person would not know that the email addresses and payment information that Proton must have access to would therefore be subject to disclosure to law enforcement. And for the vast majority of people, they aren't exactly on a tight watchlist where intelligence agencies are making thread boards to catch them committing for international crimes to make this matter.

Anyway, I especially don't understand the flack they get on this forum with people who do understand and should understand how hard it is to advertise technical features to normies.

Normal people aren't cyber criminals who needs to hide every spec of their trail from all governments. They just want to feel like no one is reading their messages or Internet history or passwords. Proton offers that, full stop.