It's like comparing Android to Qubes OS. Not really fair. For what they are, Google products are surprisingly secure.
For one their products are not "secured" from Google seeing your private data...
In simple terms, end-to-end encryption means that messages are encrypted on the sender’s device (before it even leaves their computer or mobile phone), and can only be decrypted by the recipient on their device. This means that no third party which transmits or intercepts the email between the sender and recipient (i.e. internet service providers, the NSA, or even ProtonMail as the mail server operator) can decrypt and view the message.
This powerful protection is possible because ProtonMail has PGP email encryption built-in. End-to-end encryption is done automatically without user interaction whenever messages are exchanged between ProtonMail users. For an enterprise using ProtonMail for their email hosting, this means all communications between employees are automatically protected with end-to-end encryption. ProtonMail can also support sending/receiving end-to-end encrypted messages with recipients who are not using ProtonMail. The use of end-to-end encryption makes ProtonMail a better choice for security conscious individuals and organizations.
Which would correspond to a tiny fraction of all email a normal user exchanges and Even corporate users would be unprotected if they were to use protonmail to communicate with third parties such as service providers.
It's not a panacea. There are physical threats, there are threats from the very hardware you're using. But, like it says on the box, it is a reasonably secure operating system.
[1] https://blog.quarkslab.com/xen-exploitation-part-2-xsa-148-f...
Also, with their recent foray into enterprise support, they will hopefully be able to expand their auditing efforts in the next couple of years.
That said, even though the argument is a bit flawed here, I think most attracted by it would still prefer ProtonMail for other sound arguments.
I don't know about any security brochure, but I know I can setup 2FA to use push notifications (not an insecure SMS number), and can check where all of my logins are from, and have "suspicious" logins blocked automatically, etc, etc. I can also create single-use passwords for insecure devices (such as a youtube password just for my apple TV). Not to mention how amazing they are about spam detection.
I think their security posture is actually excellent.
Yes. Most definitely. I don't use Gmail and I recently had a discussion with my coworkers about Gmail. When I asked why they use it one person said, "because it's Google" and another said, "What else would I use? Yahoo or Hotmail? Hahahah". A third person responded by saying , "it's just easy because it's Google so it connects to everything else from them."