much ado has been made on social media in the last day of proton mail handing over the payment information of a usian protestor to swiss authorities (who promptly passed it off to usian authorities). don’t let anyone make you think that it wouldn’t be worth your time to move your email off of google to a privacy and security focused email service such as mailbox.org or (if you truly must) proton mail. what proton did in this case was entirely expected and what i believe basically /any/ company offering email would do.
companies are required to hand over information to local authorities if those authorities make a lawful request for information and those companies have the information on hand. this is why authorities didn’t and couldn’t get their hands on the protestors emails via proton mail. the emails are encrypted from end to end so even if authorities showed up asking for them, proton mail doesn’t /have/ them. they /do/ have your payment information if /you/ choose one of the non-anonymous payment options.
the real reason you shouldn’t use specifically proton to move away from gmail is that the ceo is pro-maga.
instead look here for my current recommendation for email provider & alternatives.