It is not Trump’s fault
It is tempting to blame all this on Trump, but that is taking the easy way out. All Trump does is put a new face on the existing privacy problem, so now it concerns a segment of the population that previously didn’t care as much. Proton Mail users have always come from both the left and right side of the political spectrum. Today, we are seeing an influx of liberal users, but Proton Mail has also long been popular with the political right, who were truly worried about big government spying, and the Obama administration having access to their communications. Now the tables have turned.
The same terror the political right has experienced is now being felt in liberal bubbles such as Silicon Valley for the first time. The left is correct to be terrified of a Trump-led NSA snooping on their communications, especially since Silicon Valley giants like Google and Facebook can be forced to spy on users on behalf of Trump’s NSA. However, this precedent was not set by Trump – he hasn’t even taken office yet. The first major incident of a US tech giant being complicit in US government spying actually took place in 2015 under the Obama administration(new window).
Can someone remind me about the terror campaigns we had against the political right before Trump was elected?
Privacy focused services will generally be sought after by nazis, illegal arms dealers, CSAM dealers (but I repeat myself). But like with the nazi bar analogy, they need to handle it properly and take certain stances to avoid that group becoming their only customers—and the rest of us blocking it.
Email’s a bit different from the Nazi bar because it’s not public. If they’re serious about privacy, they shouldn’t even know how many of their users are Nazis. But more importantly, their non-nazi users don’t have to interact with nazis regularly like the old regulars at a now-nazi bar would. It doesn’t have the network effect.
They shouldn’t know directly, but they can still be informed by public discourse whether it seems like they have a majority normal users with some creeps thrown in, or if the only circles discussing and promoting their services are nazis, or etc.
So yeah, it’s not a 100% identity between the two, but the point remains that the actions of the owners / operators will influence whether they’ll be interpreted as openly running a nazi bar, or trying to run a normal bar but struggling to keep cryptofascists out, or something on that scale.