Failure to “Practice What You Preach”

A blog post in March on the Proton website¹ recommends several European programs or apps that circumvent potential US privacy violations. The "privacy-focused European alternatives" that are recommended in the social media category include Mastodon (which I use), Lemmy, and Friendica.

However, if you want to share that blog post, the you're offered choices of X, Reddit, LinkedIn, and Facebook! I wanted to point out the irony to the author, but there is no comment box in which to enter a reply.

Share options on Proton blog post

Even better (as in more ironic) is that blog post had been posted to Facebook with a link back that included a "fbclid" parameter. I suppose maybe we can give Proton a pass on this - they're entitled to know where their readers come from and when. But why not just have a simple "referral" parameter set to "facebook20251005185942" (or "linkedin," or whatever)? I ask because who knows what the 118-character value of fbclid unencodes to?

If you'd like to be a bit of a disruptor (or just have fun), you could append "?fbclid=biteme" to the link to the blog post before you navigate to it.

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¹ https://proton.me/blog/european-tech-alternatives