Clarifying ProtonMail and Huawei

So whilst it might have been meant callously, from my third party glance it seems quite important.

For example, no mainstream media outlet in the UK covers Al Quds day in London (absolutely nothing about this on the BBC or print media). Facts on the ground at the most recent (and previous) marches is that there is a lot of Hezbollah flags flown.

Another example is the BBC’s treatment of Brexit on three flagship panel shows, Question Time, Politics Live and Any Questions where Remain commentators outnumber Brexit commentators 3 to 1.

In this instance, Bloomberg seems to be wanting to push the 'Huawei is spying on you' narrative as well as 'Proton Mail isn't secure' narrative.

Make what you will of the points above, maybe they mean something, maybe they don't. I just keep an open mind, try to think for myself, see things from different perspectives, and do my best not to fall for my own cognitive biases.

I still use Proton Mail, and I trust their service more than GMail (I migrated from GMail to Proton Mail), but it's a nice reminder not to trust any corporation too much or get complacent with security. I really don't feel like rolling my own encrypted email solution so the question is, "Who am I willing to trust the solution to?" Ultimately I'm accountable to myself.

As for media bias, sometimes it is blatant, most times however I find it subtle. Either way it is pervasive. Unless you are scanning for it, I imagine it is incredibly easy not to think for yourself.

Bloomberg is a source that investors and traders trust with getting them some level of access to the rumour mill (in the spirit of the saying that exists among traders that goes "buy the rumour, sell the news"). The problem here is that, fact or fiction, rumours affect the financial markets, and not knowing about them puts a market participant at a disadvantage.

The article starts by saying in indicative mood "ProtonMail is in talks with Huawei Technologies Co. about including its encrypted email service in future mobile devices [...]" ...I don't really see a problem with that part of the statement since they were indeed in talks of some kind, and there's a certain bandwidth of what "including" could mean. It could just mean "making available through Huawei AppGallery", so there is nothing wrong with using indicative mood here.

In the second paragraph, the article switches the modality and says "The Swiss company’s service COULD come preloaded ..." Now, it could of course be the case, as people are alleging, that they just completely made that shit up and MANUFACTURED a rumour. But it could also be the case that they were reflecting a rumour that was already out there and sufficiently widespread that they thought that investors and traders should know about it. They used subjunctive mood using the auxiliary verb COULD to signal that there was something going on here about the modality of the statement.

ProtonMail speculated that a misunderstanding of their earlier announcement must have been the basis of Bloomberg's article. But I guess we'll never find out if that was indeed so.

ProtonMail clarified their earlier announcement and took issue with the word "partnership" being used to describe their relationship with Huawei, but, interestingly, they did not come flat out to respond to these assertions. For example, they did not say that preloading was not a topic that was discussed.

Now, it stands to reason that preloading would amount to Huawei handing a huge chunk of marketshare to ProtonMail, and then it's up to users to make up their minds about the likelihood of Huawei asking for quid-pro-quo and ProtonMail's response.

Rather than there being no basis at all for the Bloomberg article, another scenario could be that ProtonMail saw that making-up-of-minds play out on social media in response to the Bloomberg article and decided to do a one-eighty on that as a result.

...I guess we'll never know.