But the company had to stop operations in 2013 after the US government demanded encryption keys to track Snowden. Others include LavaBit, which was established in 2004 and favoured by Edward Snowden. ProtonMail is one of the recent e-mail service providers offering end-to-end encryption. Unless this changes, users of Google's consumer services will always be the product, as there is no economic incentive for Google to put user privacy first,” he says. Perhaps Eric Schmidt put it best when he said that Google's policy is to ‘Get right up to the creepy line and not cross it’. “At its core, Google is an advertising company, which means that Google's customers are not its users, but rather advertisers. And fundamentally, because they do not utilise end-to-end encryption like ProtonMail, they will always “retain the ability to read user emails”. He says Gmail will no longer “read your emails for ads, but Google will still read your emails”. Apple is one of them as is Gmail, which recently indirectly stated that it would stop scanning emails to show personalised ads.Īlso read: 9 internet privacy tools that help you hide from ‘Big Brother’īut Andy has a point to make.

“So we essentially had a piece of software that was designed for a few 100 people and we had to work around it to hold over 10,000 users and more,” he says.Īfter ProtonMail was launched, several others announced end-to-end encryption. Andy says one of the core challenges when they released their minimum viable product (MVP) was that they got 10,000 users per day, when they had built it for a few 100.

Proton email cern