Proton Is Trying to Become Google—Without Your Data

Since its founding, ProtonMail has become synonymous with user-friendly email. The company is trying to be more synonymous. On Wednesday morning, it announced that it was changing its name to "proton", a nod to its broader ambitions within the universe of online privacy. The company will now offer a subscription model for linked products. Not only will Proton subscribers have access to email, but they will also have access to a number of other things.

This is part of the master plan to give Proton a fighting chance against tech giants. After graduating from graduate school, Yen moved to Switzerland to work at the nuclear research facility. Switzerland's privacy-friendly legal regime and a steady crop of physicists made it a natural place to pivot to a privacy-focused startup. A company with more than 400 employees and 70 million users is run by Yen. He spoke to WIRED about the need for greater privacy, the dangers of Apple's and Google's dominance, and how today's attacks on encryption recall the tactics of the War on Terror.

The interview has been edited.

You are in the online privacy business. How do you define privacy?

The best way to give a definition is to give a contrast. Nobody can exploit your data except for us, that's how we define privacy. We want to build things that give us minimal data. End-to-end and zero-access encryption allow that. The best way to protect user data is not to have it in the first place.

They always say more if you ask if they would like more privacy or less. Data privacy is not a high priority for most people. Why do you think that is?

Being a human, privacy is inherent. We have locks on our doors and curtains on the windows. We tend to forget that the digital world is not the same as the physical world. If you take the analogy of someone following you around every single day, recording everything you say and do, then it's someone that's following you on a daily basis. We wouldn't tolerate that in real life. Because it is not visible on the internet, we tend to think it is not there. The one that you do see tends to be more harmful than the one that you don't.

Your company supports reforms to strengthen antitrust enforcement. Privacy and competition are in conflict according to a lot of people. If you force us to allow more competition on the platform that we run, that will reduce our control over the security and the privacy of the user. If you make us increase competition, that will bring privacy down, and then you see the flip side of the argument, which is when Apple or Google implements some new privacy feature that may hurt competitors. What do you think about the conflicts?