Need some private alternatives to Proton’s services. Specifically I need a calendar and contacts thing.
What have you considered or looked at already?
Local calendar and contacts apps, but that requires me to manually back up my data. I want something that automatically puts my data in the cloud. I’ve considered Outlook calendar and contacts, but Microsoft ain’t the best privacy company.
In brief, tell us about your privacy threat model?
I don’t want to put too much trust into Proton. I already use them for my sensitive email and VPN, and now I’m using their calendar and contacts service. I need other apps to backup my contacts and calendar.
Tutanota is a great end-to-end encrypted email service made in Germany. It has an calendar and contacts so good but it doesn’t seem they have an implementation on your average Contacts app (e.g. Access Tutanota Contacts and Calendar on both your Contacts and Calendar app).
Though, it seems they will have better contacts integration on Android and iOS according to their roadmap. All is end-to-end encrypted including the contacts and calendar.
EteSync, I never used it but it’s an interesting project. It can sync (with an account) contacts, calendar, tasks and notes with end-to-end encryption which is super cool. BUT IT IS A PAID SERVICE… Quoting their website :
Easy to use and open source - it seamlessly integrates with your existing apps so you won’t even notice you are using it!
Why don’t you just make local backups of your contacts and calendar just in case, ideally you should be making backups of your emails too. You can use the import-export app to export your emails out of your Proton account: here
You could use an encrypted USB or micro SD card and keep it somewhere secure incase you get locked out of your Proton account you will still have access to your contacts, calendars and emails. Ideally you could use a custom domain (for your most important emails) so you could just move your domain to a different provider and pick back up from where you left off.
I like the calendar in Nextcloud more than Proton, and you can integrate the NC cal into Proton with the import function. It’s very slow at updating, but it works well enough if you want to use the Proton app for notifications.
The Nextcloud calendar allows you to integrate the Tasks and Deck apps (to-do list and kanban board) into the calendar, where Proton doesn’t have any to-do list or backlog functionality. Proton is fine for personal time management, but if you need just the most basic project management it’s not very good.