• Announcements

  • Second donation to GrapheneOS by the Proton Foundation

The annual Proton Lifetime Charity Fundraiser from the Proton Foundation has concluded for 2024. We were one of 10 organizations selected for their fundraiser back in 2022 and received a donation amounting to $10,000!

Now they have sent us another $5000 as part of their commitment to support projects that were recipients in previous years. We want to thank the Proton community for all their generous donations making all of this possible and Proton Mail for matching their donations. Their financial contributions to other privacy and security software and organisations is commendable and we're happy to see their users are supportive as well.

Donations are what fund our work on upcoming features and improvements to GrapheneOS, maintaining our current ones, and the upkeep of our infrastructure.

    nice to hear!

    I tried to give a monthly donation via Paypal, but i didnt found 'grapheneos foundation' in Paypal-App.
    Login with vanadium doesnt work.

    I there a possibility to open the donation-url in PP-APP?

      Its done, but it works only in Webbrowser not in App.

      The fact that there is a donation is nice, but given the scale of Proton, it seems quite stingy. In fact, I am more inclined to agree that Proton products need to borrow the reputation of GrapheneOS.

        JFK People dislike proton for their spam fighting (user identification) related practices and their handling of user data.

        Any email service selling themselves as privacy oriented will have these two things be held in high regards.

        [Removed response to removed political posts]

          kllsajfkasjf I am more inclined to agree that Proton products need to borrow the reputation of GrapheneOS.

          I don't think that giving 5,000 $ every three years borrows the reputation of GrapheneOS. I think it is part of their marketing strategy to fund privacy software, and GrapheneOS is just one of the most obvious candidates. I'm just glad they do so !

              Eirikr70
              " we give to GrapheneOS " that's all Proton or the press have to say, not the amounts or regularity; and the Good aura from GrapheneOS and others rubs off on Proton, I am out and out cynical of donations like this, taken together with other amounts and its a tax burden write off or similar an accountants paper exercise, only big enough to be noticed and small enough to disrupt and damage regular cash flow to GrapheneOS. Regular payments are the life line of projects like GrapheneOS, dumps of cash make regular contributor's think, maybe not this month, they have enough $5000 is enough isn't it? Then one month not donating becomes two etc... You might say damned if they donate, damned if they dont. I personally, do not trust Proton.

                  area51 I didn't expect to see someone use a $5,000 donation from a pro-privacy non-profit as a reason to distrust Proton in this thread. That's quite a bold stance.

                    Andy Yen the CEO of proton answered about Monero payment support in the future 6 days ago on Reddit :

                    https://www.reddit.com/r/ProtonMail/comments/1jbdeyz/will_you_ever_accept_monero/

                    • To be honest, probably not directly, there are Swiss statutory audit issues with this. However, we are exploring ways of making this possible via third party intermediaries.

                    Larger companies in Switzerland must be audited by law, and Big 4 auditing firms are wary of crypto. You can get some of them to sign on as auditors if you have Bitcoin, but let's just say certain cryptos pose an issue. This requirement only kicks in past a certain scale. For a smaller business, you can more or less do whatever you want.

                      grayway2

                      Yes the so called privacy coins like Monero are an issue for the KYC rules.
                      For the meantime there is kycnot.me which I heard from

                        Distrust or doubts towards Proton are a recurrent theme on this forum, but I don’t see the point of uttering them again in a unconvincing manner in this very thread, under an official thanking message.

                        But since it has become the subject…

                        Proton mainstreamness comes with a price; don’t expect anything radical from Proton.
                        I do trust Proton… up to a point, which is fine. Also, maybe some people would benefit from watching this recent video from Privacy Guides.

                        grayway2

                        Maybe it’s Proton’s mainstreamness, but I am not convinced they had to choose one of the Big Four. Perhaps, if they really wanted, they could have chosen another auditor, like BDO, but they’d probably lose some benefits, or they simply didn’t want to take the risk associated with a change of auditor.
                        That being said, I cannot judge, and cannot say if it’s more strategy-driven or more prestige-driven.

                        However, to relativise the issue between auditors and Monero, I’ll point out that a firm like BDO – part of the ‘Next Ten’ auditors, maybe even the fifth globally, so the first of the Next Ten – seems to accept clients trading with Monero, for instance Bity.
                        Bity SA (bity.com) owns a network of no-KYC Monero ATMs in Switzerland, and has been audited by BDO.