I don’t think it ever says wholly owned. My understanding is that the three founders have donated their shares to the Foundation, but they didn’t own 100% of the company. Likely >50% but not 100%
To my reading it’s only part of their shares and probably results in the foundation being the biggest single shareholder while still only having a minority stake.
Feels to me after reading the article they earnestly try to do their best to offer privacy enhancing alternatives and push back often. What percent of these requests do Meta, Google or Microsoft fight? Ratios like that matter
Proton is extremely transparent and said:
If you are breaking Swiss law, ProtonMail can be legally compelled to log your IP address as part of a Swiss criminal investigation. This obligation however does not extend to ProtonVPN (see VPN privacy policy here). Additional details can be found in our transparency report.
> What percent of these requests do Meta, Google or Microsoft fight? Ratios like that matter
What others are doing doesn't matter, that's whataboutism. Yes there's many shittier services, and Proton is much better than them.
What matters is if you can trust Proton to be private, and the answer is... mostly.
Yes I like Proton and I use Proton as my daily email driver, because I don't expect privacy from governments, I just don't want Google tracking.
But a lot of people see the "no logs" thing and think that there's never any logs, which is not true, they add them on request, and they've done it based on foreign government requests, for questionable searches, as I've linked above.
If you want privacy in your hands, use Tor when accessing Proton and pay in crypto obviously.
Those are techniques needed for privacy because they can access that data and you can't trust them to safeguard any data they can access because they legally can't.
It's not their fault, it's just the system, but you must expect it.
