"...emails are safer from hacking than hillery's."

I LOL'd. That's a pretty low bar.

I think that Proton is sure better than just sending Goolag your emails directly, but I'm not particularly confident the home of the BIS is necessarily secure for plebs. I'm not competent to comment regarding encryption security, but I've read more than a few claims that spooks have compromised seeds, RNGs, and Diffie-Hellman curves (whatever those are), and have quantum computers that can crack the best encryption in a jiffy even if it isn't compromised, by folks that say they are. Then there's backdoored hardware like the IME and whatever afflicts AMD and other proprietary chips (maybe ARM isn't factory tainted? I dunno). Until we have open source hardware, actual confidential communications just seem unavailable electronically.

Accordingly I reckon encryption to be useful against non-state actors, and I don't think the WEF and social media platforms are non-state actors. I really suspect that encryption alone won't matter if your discussions really need secrecy, and that is why spooks have SCIFs, one time pads, and etc. I just don't use a phone for anything that takes passwords (as you suggest, I just don't use apps on my phone), don't do my banking online at all (they can't hack an account I don't have), and airgap (no access to the internet or airwaves for sensitive information carrying devices) anything I don't want to share with the CIA. I use a vehicle with mechanical fuel injection, and no electronic brain that can be hacked (I don't wanna end up like Michael Hastings or Anne Heche. They'll have to blind me with a laser like Princess Di's chauffeur).

But, I'm an extremist when it comes to aversion to datamining. I reckon using Protonmail, VPN, and not using Goolag apps on the phone you're sending encrypted emails with will probably work fine to prevent your data being mined for profit.

Thanks!