My story starts a few years out of college, cleaning my email spam, and for something hit me. Gmail knew a lot about me didn’t it? My teenage fanfiction, my online purchases, my college dating disasters, my post college dating disasters. I paid with data, not with money. Yet there I was, still cleaning out my spam.
I switched over to protonmail. Encryption at rest. In a super villian complex. Far from the United States. That sounded good! I’ve always viewed the service as essential, especially for those of us in the kink community. When your business is writing smut and your personal life involves power exchange, privacy matters. We need tools that actually work, not just marketing that says they do.
That’s why the recent leaks about Andy Yen’s internal meltdown hit me like the flogger backswing of an inexperienced impact player.
Yen has a phrase “bullshit and loser thinking.” That’s what he calls it when people, at the security company, want to do the security. He installed surveillance software to track “AI velocity” and created a snitch email for employees to report anyone blocking AI adoption. This isn’t just bad management; it’s a betrayal of the company’s founding premise. It’s a betrayal of the fucking workers.
The most chilling part? Yen literally told his staff that “perception is more important than truth. “The CEO of an encryption company thinks the truth doesn’t matter if it hurts the brand. He threw a tantrum on Slack because Reddit pointed out the limitations of post-quantum cryptography, demanding engineers “fix” the narrative rather than respecting the reality that you can’t retroactively encrypt old emails without a time machine.
This is what you do if you work in Hollywood and covering for a pedophile producer. You also do this in politics, if the head of your party is the same thing. That’s how you bullshit-for-clicks on youtube. This is not how you do encrypted e-mail, that people are paying you for. Would anyone accept this attitude from… our banks? Our hospitals? I think not.
Man-baby the CEO threatens to fire engineers who won’t blindly automate their jobs with AI, proclaiming he wants to “ruthlessly smash” anything standing in the way of speed. This is a bad idea. Why?
Because anyone who has worked in security knows you cannot rush security. You cannot “move fast and break things” when the things you’re breaking are the locks on my digital diary. I believe most developers want to do a good job. I don’t think they want to access my porn notes (well maybe…). But if the culture inside Proton is one of fear and silence, where security experts are too scared to point out flaws because the CEO might call them “losers,” then the product will get compromised.
I don’t want my data guarded by a petulant man child who bullies employees. I want it guarded by professionals who are allowed to do their jobs without being bullied.
My subscription renewal won’t come up for many months. I owe nothing to sunk cost fallacies. I have plenty of time to find alternatives.
But what I would prefer is if someone gets rid of this lunatic. I prefer to him to be replaced by someone who lets developers do their job.