Proton spam and the AI consent problem

> the same attitude that they used to create the AI in the first place by using content which they don't own, without permission

This was a massive "white pill" for me. When the needs of emerging technology ran head first into the old established norms of ""intellectual property"" it blew straight through like a battle tank, technology didn't even bother to slow down and try to negotiate. This has alleviated much of my concern with IP laws stifling progress; when push comes to shove, progress wins easily.

How can you get a machine to have values? Humans have values because of social dynamics and education (or lack of exposure to other types of education). Computers do not have social dynamics, and it is much harder to control what they are being educated on if the answer is "everything".

I’d argue that a lot of the scrape-and-train is just the newest and most blatant exploitation of the relationship that always existed, not a renegotiation of it. Stack overflow monetized millions of hours of people’s work. Same thing with Reddit and Twitter and plenty of other websites.

Legally it is different with books (as Anthropic found out) but I would argue morally it is more similar: forum users and most authors write not for money, but because they enjoy it.

Hahaha. It's like a protection racket for the new age.

"Nice user experience you got there. Would be a real shame if AI got added to it."

I am in the UK. TBC this isn't a gmail.com email address, this is a paid "small business" workspace against a custom domain.

Eventually they backtracked and allowed (I think?) all paid customers to disable gemini, but I had already migrated to Fastmail so :shrug:

Gmail <> Google Workspaces

Fun fact, requiring login for unsubscribe is illegal per the canspam act. The most you can do is force a user to verify their email address to you.

This is a very strange argument. If AI was so bloody revolutionary than you didn't have to sneak it into your products without consent.

Very often AI seems to be a solution looking for a problem.

> With AI, if well done, it would be useful nearly everywhere.

I fundamentally disagree with this.

I never, now or in the future, want to use AI to generate or alter communication or expression primarily between me and other humans.

I do not want emails or articles summarised, I do not emails or documents written for me, I do not want my photos altered yassified. Not now, not ever.

For me it’s just a multi-coloured ring like a gamer’s mood light, but it’s literally just slapped in the corner of the UI the same way a shitty Intercom widget would be.

Totally a thing a growth hacking team would do, injecting an interface on top of a design.

> That said, I have 3 gmail.com addresses and none of them have marketing spam emails from Google about Gemini AI showing up in the Primary inbox.

That's because they put their alerts in the gmail web interface :-/

"Try $FOO for business" "Use drive ... blah blah blah"

All of these can be dismissed, but new ones show up regularly.

> Apple doesn't send out marketing messages and obeys their customers' marketing email preferences ... except .. when you buy a new iPhone and then they send emails about "Your new iPhone lets you try Apple TV for 3 months free!" and then more emails about "You have Apple Music for 3 months free!"

That's "transactional" I'm sure. It makes sense that a company is legally allowed to send transactional emails, but they all abuse it to send marketing bullshit wherever they can blur the line.

> Maybe it's commendable that Google is showing incredible restraint so far.

Or the Gmail spam filter is working.

This is not an issue in Europe, due to effective regulation.

That marketing team only sends 1 email a month, but the 25 other marketing teams at the same company also only send 1 email a month.

> although I don’t recall opting in to them in the first place and neither of them spammed me until recently

Dark pattern. They know you'd spot immediate abuse , so they delay until you are likely to have forgotten whether you opted in.

Did you by any chance report them to something like spamcop.net ?

Aggressive spamming => Aggressive reporting.

>unsubscribe from ChatGPT emails

Really? I've never got a spam from them. Hell, I just searched and I'm not really seeing anything from them after the point where I signed up.

Again, no raindrop considers itself responsible for the flood: if you buy enough coffee-priced subscriptions, that's unaffordable. Usually people already have their coffee-priced budget allocated to something. Like coffee.

(Incidentally, this is why mobile gaming uses so many anti-patterns, to make people keep making "just one more" tiny purchase)

I guess the people you quote also missed that not all of us work in Silicon Valley and can afford those expensive coffees every day. I’d like an estimate of how many Nescafé powder coffee cups I’d have to skip per month to use their subscription.

> Spend enough time in an environment like that and you learn to frame every selfish decision as good for the customer.

This reminds me of "in order to save the environment, we are going to delete all of your recordings older than 2 years, in 2 weeks. You can't download them."

"Corporation are people, folks" said Mitt Romney (as a result of the Citizen United case). The whole thing is so cringe on so many levels.

What Romney did not say is that these particular "people" tend strongly towards sociopathic behavior.

Cloud is probably the better comparison, since crypto never had the sort of mainstream management buy-in that the other two got. Microsoft's handling of OneDrive in particular foreshadows how AI is being pushed out.

I have never received a Crypto spam email from any place where I opted out from it. Same for cloud. It feels different. With crypto it was everyone wanting to ride the hype train. With AI they spent a bunch of money up front and are desperate to see ROI.

There is at least a magnitude difference in the spread.

In theory. In practice-- I would spend all my time just filing complaints, because today, in 2026, I get more spam from "legitimate" companies than "Nigerian scammer" types

I wish I could without going through a long process involving tons of personal info

It's not a false positive to classify a company as a bad actor and move their emails to the spam folder if they refuse to respect user choices. If anything, I wish it would happen more often and at a massive scale, because then maybe companies would have an incentive to stop being so hostile around this.

With customer support positions, escalating to engineering is also seen as a negative metric. They might blame customer support for this but it’s likely that they’d have been turned away with “why are you escalating this stupid thing to us?”

Genuinely: What profits!?! The only company profiting from AI has been nVidia. Every indicator we've received for this entire alleged industry is companies buying hundreds of millions of dollars in graphics cards that then either sit in warehouses depreciating in value or, worse, are plugged in and immediately start losing money.

The tech industry has coasted on it's hypergrowth story for decades, a story laden with as many bubbles as actual industries that sprang up. All the good ideas are done now. All the products anyone actually needs exist, are enshittified, and are selling user data to anyone who will pay, including products that exist solely to remove your data from everyone who bought it and probably then sell it to some other people.

This shit is stupid at this point. All Silicon Valley has to do is to grow up into a mature industry with sensible business practices and sustainable models of generating revenue that in most other industries would be fantastic, and they're absolutely apoplectic about this. They are so addicted to the easy, cheap services that upended entire other industries and made them rich beyond imagining that they will literally say, out loud, with their human mouths, that it is a bad, undesirable thing to simply have a business that makes some money.

The people at the top of this industry are literally fucking deranged and should be interred at a psychiatric facility for awhile for their and everyone else's good.

Not :)

The indexing needs to be refreshed almost every time I use it.

No.

I have been enjoying reading this thread, but with some irony: sure the email spams pushing their Lumo LLM private chatbot were a mistake, and I bet they stop doing that fast.

The irony is that Lumo is a separate product, not really tied to the rest of their products except for a common login. Lumo works fine for the simple quality of life search and question answering stuff.

Off topic, but have you tried avoiding the big corporate LLM providers and run local models? The small models just keep getting better and I find it fun and satisfying to do as much as I can locally.

AI is the first path out of enshittification the industry has had in a while.

See https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2026/01/ebay-...

It will be funny to see the rapid about face.

> while microwaving steel

There actually are microwave-safe steel objects, it depends on their shapes and conductive paths.

After all, the whole inner-box is already a metal surface being blasted by the microwaves that come in through a small hole...

They're checking to see whether any of the links they put in the emails are being fetched from their servers. It's stupid, but it works for most people.

I had a similar situation with SMS messages that were being sent to me with links informing me of status updates. These texts were useful, and I would go over to my real computer to check the web site. Then after a few days the text messages said "It looks like these messages aren't getting through to you, so we'll stop sending them." Which is also stupid, but it works for most people that load the web site on their phone from the SMS link. God help you if you have a dumb-phone.

Probably tracking pixels in the emails

This is illegal practice in the EU

The trick is create a filter to weed out such junk. And if a company sends me marketing fluff without unsubscribe option, then it goes in the junk/spam folder, and I may eventually discontinue my account with that service provider altogether.

Because I periodically check my sp/junk folder to see if legitimate emails got dumped there, so I eventually know who's a spammer and who's not.

Yes, but not anywhere near as annoying for me at least.

In Windows 10, they added a shortcut Ctrl+Win+Alt+Shift to open Microsoft Office 365 (or whatever they call(ed) it). Caused me a ton of confusion and annoyance when I picked up my laptop by the corner of the keyboard.

This never stops annoying me that it exists.

What the fuck lmao

Molly, the Signal fork, has exactly this feature. https://molly.im/

>I get their point that you can't provide a "No" in the reminder.

Yes you can. All reminders should have an option "Do not remind me again."

Cryptographical superiority aside, Signal doesn't collect personal data, unlike Whatsapp. For me that's the main reason to use it. The UX is good enough, although some points can for sure be improved.

Sounds like they just don't care about privacy, do they? Guess showing them https://i.redd.it/0imry50rxy961.png still won't change anything..

WhatsApp isn't any better, it's just more popular.

> It may be cryptographically superior, but does that matter at the end of the day if nobody uses it?

I've made a few attempts to convert people, but no-go. People stay on Telegram and WhatsApp because they have better UX and features.

Signal refuses to see the value in good attractive UX.

The FTC established a "click-to-cancel" rule, but (as with just so many regulations in the US) it was blocked by an appeals court. Federal law says there's a hoop they have to jump through for rules with an impact of more than $100 million, and they didn't jump through the hoop because they didn't think the impact was that high.

No we don't. Banks yes, but outside of banking no one respects this.

So creepy and weird this comment has downvotes. These people/companies absolutely do not value nor care about consent.

Proton’s pricing is really frustrating for me because I want to buy upgrades to only a few services like Pass and email. Your only option on their service is to select either Pass or Mail. You cannot buy both and you will be downgraded on one if you try to buy the other.

Email and calendar go together like bread and butter.

I wouldn't use one without the other, which is how they won my business.

I’m a heavy user of masked emails from Fastmail. Can you expound on the insecurity you mentioned?

Your plus is someone else's minus.

Of course, if you or your family are not the victim of a terror attack, you may not care if others are impacted by it.

After 9/11, USA did the biggest crackdown on terror, including domestic security overhaul such as stringent security checks in airports, more pervasive surveillance, etc.

Microsoft has recently given FBI recovery keys for Bitlocker to unlock a suspect's laptops: https://techcrunch.com/2026/01/23/microsoft-gave-fbi-a-set-o...

And this was for fraud investigation, not even a terror investigation case.

Every nation responds to repeated terror attacks in a similar way. Increased surveillance, increased scrutiny, increased vigilance, retaliatory strikes.

What do you expect? Let terror attacks happen, try not to prevent them, try not to retaliate at terrorist networks and nests?

You live in a cosy idealistic world, if you think that terrorism can be handled by ignoring it or its mechanisms of communication.

I will respond to a quote with another famous quote: “Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty."

The only ways to prevent terror attacks is by either going deep undercover into terror organisations, or by doing surveillance and investigation on suspected terror links.

Next time there is a mass shooting or terrorist bomb blast in your neighborhood, I hope you can look at a poster of Proton VPN on your bedroom wall, and feel safe.

And then when you find out the police are going door to door to investigate the terror attack, you should start distributing printouts of an ad of Proton VPN urging locals on how to evade police/government scrutiny via Proton VPN.

See how that works out for you. You will be arrested as a terror sympathiser.

No surprises why.

It's because terrorists use VPNs to evade scrutiny, and the last thing that any respectable company or civilian should be doing is to openly associate themselves with terrorism, which is what Proton has done.

Proton (or any legitimate company, for that matter) has no business doing subversive activities in terror sensitive areas like J&K. If they do, then they need to face the repercussions.

https://tfipost.com/2026/01/profit-over-people-proton-vpn-ge...

Please stay on topic.

J&K has long been a target of terror attacks. Long before Modi as PM.

Proton has no business inciting terrorists in known terrorist hotspots to evade the government.

People living in glass houses should not throw stones on others.

I am going to use your own words to show you the mirror now..

Your America and its democratically-voted (even if we can call gerrymandering such) orange dictator have become the "laughingstock of Western politics".

The "war on terror" excuse to do wars for oil, was coined by "Western politic(ian)s", "exacerbating" to "manufacture consent for authoritarian policy".

Recent example: Venezuela. It is pure greed and evil for a rich nation to seize a struggling country for its oil (struggling because of sanctions to prevent it from selling its oil legally). "Eyes roll whenever someone justifies drastic action on foreign nations based on vague pretexts/accusations".

Older example: Did the USA/NATO ever find those "Weapons of Mass Destruction" in Iraq? Oh wait, the WMDs were there, because they brought them there.. to wage that war.. war not on terror... but war for oil. They didn't find any WMDs, but they certainly quickly found those rich oilfields, and then systematically looted them.. and finally set them on fire, when retreating.. from the war they started.. knowing that without that precious oil, the natives of that desert land will struggle to limp back to normalcy, especially with a Western puppet as a "democratic leader" for "positive influence on national politics".

Such tactics are not "a positive influence" on the world, because the world hates bullies. And thieves.

not an issue for me in general. side channels for nearly everyone i'd need email-style communication with, especially if their primary contact method is handled by any FAANG. I send test emails manually; usually when a semiweekly newsletter sends a plaintext "apparently our newsletters are bouncing", which they detect by autoresponders autoresponding. they say it's been consistently 8 median autoresponses per newsletter for 18 years, so when they get zero...

True, microslop has a record of breaking GDPR and changing ToS without notifying users and looks like they are free to do so.

My understanding is that a company's location is largely irrelevant; a company becomes subject to the GDPR when they handle EU citizens' data (or UK GDPR when it's UK citizens), and the EU/UK will still try to fine companies that aren't resident in the EU/UK - enforceability is a different question, although non-payment of fines opens the door to other remedies e.g. blocking access, seizing assets, etc.