Just out of curiosity, what feels shady about ProtonMail?

I believe a competitor of theirs has been actively trying to spread distrust of them on HN. I don't remember the details well, but I think they allege that ProtonVPN and ProtonMail aren't independent from each other when they claim they are.

There is a smear campaign going on, but not about precisely this. The smear campaign is that since ProtonVPN is free, it must be doing something nefarious.

ProtonMail and ProtonVPN are legally separate, but they are both part of the Proton family of projects which originated from CERN.

I'm not sure what competitor you're referring to, I don't think they have many of those (tutanota, maybe? Or startmail?) but I assure you I don't work for one of those. There's not another email provider I have significantly more trust in or that I think does everything right while protonmail does everything wrong, there's just a minor sticky feeling that I have using them.

Thank you, I am aware of the alternatives but it's an uphill battle to fight a monopoly, i.e. I have only Comcast here as Internet option, etc.

Not using google is actually a piece of cake. Ther are reasonable competitors for nearly all of their services, except maybe translate and maps. Though I have been looking at OSM a lot lately.

I, personally, use an DuckDuckGo, an iPhone and Apple mail. Amazon isn't an issue really- just buy whatever you were going to get on amazon somewhere else - it's pretty rare that I find a noticeable price difference (unless we're talking about the cheap off branded stuff on amazon - but I don't want things like that anyway).

DeepL is a good alternative to Google Translate, though it is quite a bit more limited in terms of features and languages. I often find DeepL translations to be of higher quality than Google's (for the 2-3 languages I regularly translate between).

> Not using google is actually a piece of cake

not using google is easy, not losing data for 15+ years and counting is significantly harder. even Apple dropped my photos due term of service change, I had to scramble gigabites off internet into disks and now my collection is an unindexed mess.

To be fair to Google, they (mostly) make it fairly easy to move out; exporting your Photos with Takeout returns a nice archive where each image is accompanied by a JSON file with metadata. It's not any standard format, as far as I can tell, but should be easy enough to massage into whatever you want.

Well, it is somewhat of an uphill battle, sure, but every hill has a top ;-)

As for internet, you can always get yourself a VPS and tunnel everything through that, so your monopoly ISP doesn't get to see anything of what you do.