Proton is beginning to shift its physical infrastructure out of Switzerland, fearing a fresh bout of government snooping baked into the country’s updated surveillance laws.
The company has confirmed that Lumo, its newly launched AI chatbot positioned as a privacy-friendly ChatGPT rival, is the first to move. Servers for the product are now being housed in Germany, with Norway also in the frame for future operations. This comes amid serious grumbling about amendments to the country’s existing surveillance ordinance, which would force VPNs and messaging apps to identify users and store their data for up to six months.
Proton has been vocal about its opposition since May. In a statement roton’s head of anti-abuse and account security Eamonn Maguire said: “Because of legal uncertainty around Swiss government proposals to introduce mass surveillance, proposals that have been outlawed in the EU, Proton is moving most of its physical infrastructure out of Switzerland. Lumo will be the first product to move."
Well, fuck. “You can keep your Nazi gold to yourself, but we need your LLM interactions.”
Add another thing to the list of reasons I’m losing trust in Proton. Might start having to look at a new email provider soon, I guess.
If you don’t like LLMs then why can’t you just not use them? Why do you have to start avoiding everything LLM like the plague?
Because companies that chase LLMs tend not to give me a choice, that’s why. They inject it into everything they touch because they think it’s the Future™, and therefore I must obviously want it around every second of my life, every day, consequences be damned. The earth can burn, my privacy can erode, misinformation can run rampant, and the copyright of small artists can die, all for the sake of an overused, scarcely-functional “tool” that a bunch of MBAs think I can’t so much as breathe without.
Almost nobody actually wanted Proton to make this. They just went and did it to chase a trend, ignoring the many people who hate it all the while. The last thing I need is for the the company that my email depends on to start getting dragged around by tech bros. If they’re willing to make a decision as rash and irresponsible as that, it is a clear indicator that worse is to come.
Eloquently put 👌
What do you mean they don’t give you a choice? You always have the choice not to use it. DDG gives me AI summaries and I never read them. WhatsApp has an LLM button I’ve never pressed. Twitter has Grok, never tried it. Android probably has Gemini somewhere, and I don’t even know how to access it. As for Proton’s LLM, I hadn’t even heard of it despite paying for their email for a decade. I just don’t see how something existing as a feature in a service I already use somehow mandates me to engage with it.
If someone is so deeply anti-LLM that they want to avoid all this on principle, I don’t necessarily have an issue with that. But personally, I genuinely struggle to grasp the logic behind it. People seem to have a strong emotional response to LLMs - your reply makes that pretty clear - and that’s the part that really boggles my mind.
I do avoid LLMs on principle. I find the technology and the manner in which it is used repugnant for a variety of reasons, most but not all of which I’ve already elaborated on here. At this point, I hate it even in the very niche scenario where it is useful, precisely because I think it does too much harm to be deserving of acceptance in any field at all. The most I can say for it is that I might be willing to slowly change that stance once this horrid bubble pops and the world stops getting set aflame for the sake of stock options.
Given your befuddlement at my stance though, I feel I should highlight and restate the following:
The presence of an LLM on a site is indicative to me of the character of those running it. It speaks to trend-following, a lack of understanding, and disdain for the intricacies of human work. If they weren’t trend-followers, they’d understand that LLMs have utterly failed to prove themselves as actually useful and would hold off to see if they ever do before using them. If they understood what was going on, they’d know that what LLMs actually do is typically irrelevant to most businesses. If they had any respect for the depths of creativity or effort, they’d know that what modern-day “AI” creates is a hollow imitation; a series of black-boxes that vaguely approximate a thing without having the capacity to understand anything that makes it up. And they’d know that in so doing such software creates something broken that serves only to devalue the efforts of real artists and writers, both in how it convinces studios to ignorantly fire them to improve a number at the expense of quality, and in how its rampant use as a cheating tool engenders environments of serious distrust.
If someone’s got an LLM on their site, or if they’ve decided to offer an LLM of their own through their business, they communicate to me a serious deficit in their understanding of the world at large. That the only thing they’re interested in is a graph someone showed them at a marketing meeting. They want metrics for investors, not a good product—and if that’s the kind of goals they’ve got, what reason have I to believe they won’t step on me to accomplish them?
Proton is making an LLM, and from that I know that their leadership is failing and that their future is likely bleak. I can’t trust my email in those hands.
That Whatsapp button is very annoying and can’t be removed. It feels like every app has a „helpful“ chatbot now that sits in the corner, occasionally telling you it exists. They really want everyone to use it. DDG at least gives you options to completely disable it.
But I agree it’s not a red flag for me, especially if I can hide it.