I am very confused by this. I have Proton VPN running on two machines, my Windows gaming PC and my old gaming PC that’s now working as a file server running Linux Mint. I have kill switch enabled on both. Jellyfin is running on the Mint PC (standard install, not Docker) and I regularly access it on my gaming PC via the browser. I can also access network drives from the Mint PC that I’ve mapped to the Windows PC. If I’m reading Proton’s response right, I shouldn’t be able to do this, yet I’ve been doing it for about a year.

You keep saying linking a Google account, but nowhere do I see that happening. Setting up a mail forward is not in any way linking anything.

The clarification is appreciated, but I didn’t say anything about giving data to the USA. I was talking specifically in the context of free vs paid services and in this case, if one opts for the free tier of Dropbox, one is giving Dropbox and all those other companies listed access to one’s info.

When you say things like, “Proton doesn’t disclose any hosting company,” after going on about Dropbox being out of the norm because they do, you are in fact specifically saying “Dropbox good, Proton bad.” You haven’t corrected anything, just rushed to the defense of your preferred company. And if you prefer Dropbox over Proton, that’s fine. There are plenty of people who simply don’t care about online privacy or see the trade offs for giving their data away as a fair price for “free” services. That said, there’s nothing in that Proton blog post that’s actually wrong, as far as I can see.