At the same time, Proton makes paying anonymously difficult. If you want to pay with Monero they don't officially support it and you have to go through a third party and buy a gift card, which is also not documented on their website, or exchange Monero for Bitcoin and pay with that. Contrast with IVPN/AirVPN/Mullvad which all officially support Monero. Also looking at their payment page, if you do pay with credit card they automatically renew by default, thus storing your credit card information without making that clear. Contrast with IVPN which doesn't by default and clarifies the privacy drawbacks, and Mullvad which doesn't do that at all. Sure the activist shouldn't have used a credit card, but at the same time Proton aggressively markets themselves as a privacy service so they need to act like one instead of encouraging bad privacy practices because subscriptions are profitable.