This year I bit the bullet and moved mail, calendar and drive from Google to Proton. Knowing that my family is not being profiled when, for example, I plan a doctor's appointment feels liberating.

Sure, there were fun and useful technical improvements, like getting a podcast microphone because these days I am literally talking to my computer more than ever because of LLM agents. And definitely, CLI agents like Claude Code are changing software development dramatically. Either of those probably would make a flashier blog post. But when it comes to giving me peace of mind, moving to a private and European alternative to Big Tech beats everything.

There are quite a few reasons why.

The main trigger was actually ... my wife. When she realised all the documents we had on Google Drive that related to our children she came on board. Without her moving with me, we would still be sharing email and calendars in Google, which made it all a lot more futile. It is strange, we have always found privacy important but sort of accepted the convenience of it all until we came to realise: how we act and what we share online on which platforms, more likely than not, will impact our children too.

Other reasons for moving:

  • The US-Europe relationship has fundamentally shifted. The policymakers in the US are using Big Tech platforms to put political pressure on Europe. And the other way around, Big Tech, all US-based, use the shifted policies to put pressure on our European privacy protections because it goes against their business models.
  • The rise of AI. While I use it a lot, AI is also trained on the data we provide, online and while using their products. They already have a lot on us but AI has added a whole new dimension. And even if a platform says they do not use it to train, in the end what matters is that they can and we have to trust them that they do not. They can change policy when they want to. Enshittification is real.

So to be explicit, we moved mail, calendar and drive, which we all had on Google, to Proton. We also stopped using Google Photos to back up our photos. Since we had at least 3 accounts to move, we are now on the family plan. Meanwhile I am also using Proton Authenticator and Proton Pass.

Was it hard to migrate? Not really. For mail and calendar you can import all your mails easily with Proton's 'Easy Switch' (it worked). Drive was a bit more involved but pretty straightforward too (it makes use of Google Takeout). Note: I mail from my own domain so I did not need to change email addresses. My family has a shared Gmail address, but since Gmail supports e-mail forwarding, we’ve been able to migrate the most important accounts first and move the rest gradually. Less and less mail is passing through Gmail.

Why Proton and not one of the other services? When I researched it came down to Proton or Tuta. I chose Proton because their pricing did not scale linearly with the number of users as it would with Tuta: Proton has a family plan which means we could have a lot more users for a lower price. Also, Proton offers a lot more included services, all privacy-oriented.

Migrating is not all roses but I honestly have had no second thoughts in light of my 'whys of moving'. Proton Drive in particular is not at the level of Google Drive (slow).

Of course, almost everyone I interact with is on some Big Tech provider platform, I am under no illusions on where my data is, but at least for our family's internal planning and communication it makes a difference.

Thank you for reading, Hans

PS (really): This post is not intended as a promotional post for Proton. But if you decide to give it a try or move, please consider using my referral link (details on the referral program here).