Take Proton for example. They advertise themselves as a “privacy by default” company. I used to admire their work and suggest them to people. I still suggest them to people who are in their first steps of reclaiming their privacy rights and moving away from Gmail and other proprietary dis-services.

But I don’t trust them anymore. I don’t know why but when a company grows to be large (relatively), serving hundreds of thousands, or possibly millions, of users, they lose my trust.

Something pokes me from inside and tells me that when they grow, they no longer work for my interest, but they work for their own benefit. When they become a giant, they become blind, they forget their initial mission and goals, and they do whatever they can to remain in business by all means, rather to work hard to protect their users.

Perhaps there are measures and hard work from their side to make sure they can’t violate our privacy even if they want to. The Proton case, for example, claims that they encrypt every inbox (or account) individually with our passwords as keys. Or they have an option to enable a second password on your account that further encrypts the account if I understand it right.

But that still doesn’t change my opinions regarding them. I understand that they perhaps do a lot to ensure that our data never ends up in the wrong hands (or any hands), but it’s still internet we’re talking about and it’s still us vs. a company that works for profit.

Of course that I may be wrong, but that’s how I feel about giant companies. I love this paranoia as it reminds me how much I still value my privacy and I haven’t get tired of protecting myself.