TL;DR, Proton was demanded to hand over the information that they had on someone to the Spanish authorities. They complied and gave them all the information they had: a recovery email address.
If you have evidence of your claims, please share them, as Proton is a widely used email, but you can't make these sorts of claims without evidence.
I agree to not be using something that comes from Chrome, but Chromium is open-source, so it's not like it's actively benefiting Google, right? (Correct me if I'm wrong.)
Having exit nodes for their VPN is not the same as collaborating with the government. There is no evidence that the Israeli government has access to any of their information, their servers are hosted in Switzerland.
I hear about a book that sounds interesting (searching or talking to friends for recommendations), and put that next on my list. My next is Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky.
A great thing about the Proton "ecosystem" is that it is not like Google where you need an account to access docs (or VPN on mobile!), though I agree that centralisation isn't the best thing for tech nerds like us. That's why I prefer to just use ProtonMail and VPN, and leave the other stuff like drives and password managers to other open-source projects.
(Also, having an ecosystem may be good for those who refuse to put in as much effort as us, or those who simply do not understand as much as we do. I personally don't support centralisation, but there's a reason that non-tech nerds often do.)
I don't like the usage of Chromium in general, but it is open-source, so I don't think the usage of it is necessarily a dealbreaker, considering it's not the same as using Chrome. As far as I am aware, Vivaldi is not fully open-source, but generally has a good reputation.
TL;DR: Proton complied with Spanish authorities and gave up all the information they had on a man (the recovery email.)
With this in mind, I would personally say Proton is safe. The fact that all they were capable of providing was the recovery email should show that Proton is trustworthy with their privacy.
This is only one case, if anyone has any others, please do share them.
Glad to see this! I've been using it for some time now, it's a bit slow and glitches occasionally but is overall a great service. I hope it continues to grow and improve as time goes on!
Not saying this is false, but can you send a link to an article that discusses this? The man in the video didn't.