Proton CEO's AI Psychosis Threatens The Usefulness of Their Products

Hello everyone and welcome to another edition of Privacy Tips, the sister podcast for Stupid Sexy Privacy. I'm your host, BJ Mendelson.

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Now my friends...

Stupid Sexy Privacy has wrapped, and you can find all of the episodes online at stupidsexyprivacy.com. All you have to do is click or tap on where it says episodes.

Our website is under some major construction and will be throughout the rest of 2026. So please pardon our dust if you find something that does not work at this moment. The website and some of the episode edits are on my list of things to get done as soon as the audiobook is out in stores.

That should be like literally any day now.

As soon as I get it, Rosie and I will start doing the media to promote it, and then I will be able to go back and fix up the website. Speaking of which, the purpose of Privacy Tips is to give me an opportunity to read from my version of How To Protect Yourself From Fascists & Weirdos.

Think of this podcast like the director's commentary you used to find on DVDs. Remember those? If not, think of this podcast as something that you can listen to while you read the book. The PDF of the book is available right now, absolutely free, at stupidsexyprivacy.com.

All you have to do is click or tap on the word book to get yourself a free copy.

Now, I'm releasing this week's podcast earlier. I know a lot of you expect it on Thursday. Under normal circumstances, that's when this podcast would come out. Thursday, November 5 at midnight.

However, because election day is Tuesday, November 3 here in America, and we have no idea if that's the last free and fair election our country will ever have, I thought it'd be a wise idea to get ahead of things.

We will be back to our normal Thursday release schedule on Thursday, November 12 at midnight.

Assuming there's no fascist coup that's taking place, of course, because if one does, well, I'll need to update you about any breaking news.

And that's kind of why I wanted to leave Thursday open a little bit, Thursday, November 5, in case I need to pop back on.

There probably won't be an episode. Hopefully everything will go well. If you've gone out and voted, you've done your part. If you have not, please go out and do so.

AI Psychosis

Now speaking of breaking news, a lot of you forwarded me at bjmendelson@duck.com where all emails are welcome, 404 Media's latest coverage on Proton.

I find 404 Media to be a reliable source, so they are very trusted around these parts. So if they tell you there's a problem, that is something to pay attention to. And last week they told us that there was a problem with Proton CEO, seeming to have developed some kind of alleged AI psychosis, and is leading the company, according to the reporting, down a dark path. I'm tracking the story.

As of right now, there's no reason to think the Proton VPN or Proton Mail services, both of which we recommend, have been impaired in terms of their security by the alleged actions of Proton CEO. However, and this is really important, if it's true that Proton is encouraging their engineers to vibe code, which is basically letting the large language model code for them without a human bothering to look at what's being produced, then we're going to have to make a pretty serious decision here about our recommendation of Proton services.

This is really crappy timing because the book is all about pushing Proton Mail and ProtonVPN.

For now, if you're like me and still using Proton stuff, you're fine. It's just something to be aware of that the company behind these products might be heading in a bad direction that may at some point in the future impact these products. If they continue to head in this direction, they being Proton, we'll need to find a new VPN and email service to recommend. In the book, we recommend DuckDuckGo's VPN, but as we pointed out, that's good for most people in most cases.

If you're an investigative journalist like me and need extra security, then ProtonVPN is what we recommend instead of DuckDuckGo's VPN. So for most people in most cases, if you're using DuckDuckGo's VPN, you're fine. If you're taking our suggestion in the book to use the more advanced VPN, which is offered by Proton, or Proton's email services, this is just something to keep in the back of your head for right now.

As the story develops, we will keep you posted.

It kind of sucks that this is happening, but you know, look, AI psychosis is real. And there's a lot of education that needs to be done with people out there about not believing the AI summaries that Google produces and not copying and pasting those into Facebook groups. I saw that a lot this week.

And there's also a lot of education about people getting addicted to these things. And we're finding that the use of AI actually slows down your cognitive ability.

We're living in a weird world. I will do my best to keep you posted on all this stuff. Right now my goal of Privacy Tips is just to go through the book. I just want to get through the book. And once the book is done, we'll start to go back and talk about these changes and what happens if we need to change from Proton to Tuta.But the other thing is that Tuta may also have similar problems.

So where do we go?

Those are all questions we will get to as soon as we're done reading through the book.

If you have questions about things that are happening right now after the book was published, remember the book officially was published on October 23. So if it happens after October 23, we're definitely tracking it.

We're definitely paying attention to it, but we may not necessarily talk about it unless it's something really major like this Proton thing.

But feel free to keep sending me stuff. If there's things that you're concerned about or if there's privacy and security questions just in general that you have, I don't have all the answers, but you can at least email me at bjmendelson@duck.com and I'll try to give you an answer to the best of my ability based on the current information that we have.