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Proton spam and the AI consent problem

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Re: Proton spam and the AI consent problem

#61

Post by pseudalopex »

bayindirh wrote: post #25
ivan_gammel wrote: post #19

I think we must make it clear that this is not related to AI at all, even if the product in question is AI-related. It is a very common problem with modern marketing teams, that have zero empathy for customers (even if they have one, they will never push back on whatever insane demands come from senior management). This is why any email subscription management interface now is as bloated as a dead whale. If too many…

I believe this is combined with something I call "asymmetry blindness". They may say "but we send an single e-mail per month, this can't be bad". We the users get a barrage of e-mails everyday because every marketing team is thinking we only get their mail, and it makes our lonely and cold mailbox merrier. No, users are in constant "Tsunami warning!" mode and these teams are not helping.

Our subscription product costs less than expensive coffee. Unused RAM is wasted.

Re: Proton spam and the AI consent problem

#62

Post by dwedge »

This is good timing actually. I've been self-hosting SimpleLogin for a while but was considering the lifetime subscription to Proton to get it (it comes with ProtonPass but I selfhost VaultWarden).

Last week I logged into my Proton mail that I'd used last year for some government contact to get the dates, and they'd deleted the account for inactivity. Ok, I don't pay, they're entitled. But now I see this and I think maybe I'll save the $150 or whatever it is.

Re: Proton spam and the AI consent problem

#63

Post by dwedge »

SCdF wrote: post #51
ivan_gammel wrote: post #19

I think we must make it clear that this is not related to AI at all, even if the product in question is AI-related. It is a very common problem with modern marketing teams, that have zero empathy for customers (even if they have one, they will never push back on whatever insane demands come from senior management). This is why any email subscription management interface now is as bloated as a dead whale. If too many…

I disagree: in as much as I have noticed this *far* more with AI than any other advancement / fad (depending on your opinion) than anything else before. This also tracks with every app and website injecting AI into every one of your interactions, with no way to disable it. I think the article's point about non-consent is a very apt one, and expresses why I dislike this trend so much. I left Google Workspace, as a pay…

Even WhatsApp has it in the search bar

Re: Proton spam and the AI consent problem

#64

Post by dwedge »

hsbauauvhabzb wrote: post #11
Terr_ wrote: post #2

> Has anyone else noticed that the AI industry can’t take “no” for an answer? AI is being force-fed into every corner of tech. It’s unfathomable to them that some of us aren’t interested. The entire AI industry is built upon a common principle of non-consent. I can't help but see the spam as more circumstantial evidence of a bubble, where top-down "pump those numbers" priorities overrides regular process.

Agree. The number of services i use where the apps continually add new marketing preferences which are defaulted to ‘enabled’ despite the fact that all other preferences are disabled is disgusting and clearly used by some companies to ignore people’s actual preferences. LinkedIn is one of the worst offenders.

Whenever I login to LinkedIn I get "emails aren't getting through to your main email address".

1. That's by design, because you spammed the shit out of it. 2. Given that all I do is send them to /dev/null, HOW DO YOU KNOW?

Re: Proton spam and the AI consent problem

#65

Post by mtlmtlmtlmtl »

I'm so fed up with Proton. I will be taking my business elsewhere. Instead of making a great product for X, they've decided to make a series of extremely mediocre products for P, Q, X, Y, Z and W, all of which are left missing the most basic features for years. Features which even the free alternatives already have. Things like supporting unicode in email headers without having to use punycode, creating mailboxes from sieve filters and a bunch of other sieve expansions, and decent, portable, non-bugridden integration with email clients. Protondrive has such dogshit speeds it's basically completely useless. The nat-pmp support on their vpn servers is very strange, and it took me a couple weeks to craft a script that could handle all of its idiosyncrasies, none of which are documented. I haven't even bothered trying their calendar, password manager, or the Yet Another AI Service they keep sending me upselling emails for. I don't need any of those things, but I'm sure they have similarly lacklustre feature parity.

Doesn't help that when i notify them about these things, their support people just gaslight me. "I've notified our development team about this". Then nothing happens. I told them about the speed issue with protondrive when it was new, that was years ago now. Still not fixed, no updates, nada.

I will be moving to something like fastmail, plus some other vpn service, since those are the only two products of theirs I'm actually using. It seems like I'll get a far better product in both cases for almost half the overall cost.

Re: Proton spam and the AI consent problem

#66

Post by lynx97 »

ivan_gammel wrote: post #19

I think we must make it clear that this is not related to AI at all, even if the product in question is AI-related. It is a very common problem with modern marketing teams, that have zero empathy for customers (even if they have one, they will never push back on whatever insane demands come from senior management). This is why any email subscription management interface now is as bloated as a dead whale. If too many…

It is an error to believe this is only happening in/with marketing. In general, "empathy" and "capitalism" are mutually exclusive. If profit is your goal, you don't care about individuals.

Re: Proton spam and the AI consent problem

#68

Post by gingerlime »

I’ve had a similar experience when signing up for Office365 and started getting promotional emails to CoPilot. These (2) emails were without an unsubscribe option.

I contacted MS support and after some back n forth they claimed it was a transactional email that doesn’t require consent or opt out.

Clearly promotional and not necessary but they won’t listen.

I’m in the process of filing GDPR + ePrivacy complaints, but it’s a tedious process, unlikely to do anything.

Re: Proton spam and the AI consent problem

#69

Post by zemnl »

dwrolvink wrote: post #26
kenhwang wrote: post #12

Odd, I didn't even know Proton had an AI feature until I read this article. Didn't get an email or tooltip while using the app. Didn't previously explicitly opt-out either, and when I check my notification settings, Lumo product updates is set to disabled. Maybe someone's feature gate isn't working as intended? I did get the Github Copilot spam email today though.

Me neither, it's probably related to OP having a business subscription

I do think the same too, I have a Proton subscription (non-business), my "Lumo Product Updates" is toggled OFF and I've never received a single Lumo email so far.

Re: Proton spam and the AI consent problem

#70

Post by TeMPOraL »

hattmall wrote: post #32
Terr_ wrote: post #2

> Has anyone else noticed that the AI industry can’t take “no” for an answer? AI is being force-fed into every corner of tech. It’s unfathomable to them that some of us aren’t interested. The entire AI industry is built upon a common principle of non-consent. I can't help but see the spam as more circumstantial evidence of a bubble, where top-down "pump those numbers" priorities overrides regular process.

The really strange thing is that so much of it doesn't work. Like I get that the SOTA models perform some tasks quite well and have some real value. But the AI being implemented in every corner creates a lot of really bad results. The Shopify code assistant will completely wreck your site and basically gets nothing correct. It will write 100 lines to change a color of a single DIV. The Amazon product Q&A will give yo…

It's a desperate attempt at staying relevant, even if most of those companies don't realize it yet. Because of its general-purpose nature, AI subsumes products. Most software products that try to "implement AI in every corner" would, from the user's POV, be more useful if they became tools for ChatGPT/Claude/Gemini.

People's goals are rarely limited to just one software product, and products are basically defined as a bag of tools glued with UI, that work together but don't interoperate much with anything else. That boundary drawn around a bunch of software utilities, is given a name and a fancy logo, and sold or used to charge people rent. That's software products. But LLMs want to flip that around - they're good at gluing things, so embedding one within a product is just a waste of model capabilities, and actually makes the product boundary more apparent and annoying.

Or in short: consider Copilot in Microsoft Word, vs. "Generate Word Document" plugin/tool for a general LLM interface (whether Gemini webapp or Claude Code or something like TypingMind). The former is just an LLM locked in a box, barely able to output some text without refusing or claiming it can't do it. The latter is a general-purpose tool that can search the web for you, scrap some sites and run data analysis on results (writing its own code for this), talk results over with you, cross-reference with other sources, and then generate you a pretty Word document with formatting and images.

This is, btw., a real example. I used a Word document generator with TypingMind and GPT-4 via API, and it was more usable over a year ago than Copilot is even now. Partly because Copilot is just broken, but mostly because the LLM can do lots of things other than writing text in Word.

Point being, AI is eroding the notion of software product as something you sell/rent, which threatens just about the entire software industry :).

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