‘Nine out of ten people prefer our version of the internet over Google’s’ — Proton Founder Andy Yen on age verification, Big Tech, AI, and the future of digital privacy chiara.castro@futurenet.com (Chiara Castro) | usagoldmines.com

I think Snowden put the spotlight on what was going on with government surveillance, but it was already obvious back then to me that there was a bigger issue. Back then, I really didn’t want to create accounts — I just didn’t want to because I knew what they were doing with the data. There was no alternative. If you look back in those days, there was no alternative.

In fact, if you wanted a private email online without data being abused, you had to host your own server, which is, of course, very difficult to do, and even then you wouldn’t have encryption. So, at the very beginning, Proton was really about building a service that I myself wanted for an audience.

Well, it’s difficult because we have formidable competitors in every market that we operate in. Some people look at Proton and say, “Look, you’re insane to do this. Why do you enter all these markets with these big players already?” But we do things in a different way, and this is the key.

Of course, I compete with Google on email — that’s the most famous competitor — but my email is completely different. The product is different, the values are different, and the security and privacy are completely different. Even within the VPN space, it’s very difficult to know who you can trust.

It’s very difficult to understand who actually in the long run is going to uphold the values, especially in an industry where companies are getting bought and sold all the time. Maybe you like ExpressVPN or whatever, but then they got sold to somebody else. It’s a very confusing space.

And I think the stability of Proton, the adherence to the values for more than 10 years, and the consistency of what we stand for — that’s a differentiator and maybe an advantage as well.

So, I don’t fear having many giants competing in the sectors that I’m in because we do things a different way. And I think over time, customers begin to appreciate that.

I think it’s very difficult to find 11 different companies that are all trustworthy. It’s statistically very unlikely. And if you find 11 different companies, these are probably going to be smaller businesses which may not have the same resilience and reliability. In many cases, we’re lucky in some industries just to have one company that we can trust, so finding 11 is difficult.

At the end of the day, if a user believes that their threat model means they need to compartmentalize their data across different services, I’m okay with that. I hope to be one among the 11 that they pick. But the vast majority of users — I would say probably more than half — don’t actually want to manage 11 subscriptions. They prefer to have everything in one place and to find one company they can trust, because finding one is difficult enough.

To be honest, we do a lot of work with web standards and the web in general because we have to. Just because Proton is hiring someone with browser expertise should not be read from the outside as necessarily saying we’re going to build a browser. That’s not a conclusion to draw.

In terms of the comments, the overwhelming feedback I saw was people saying, “You should focus on existing products; there are already browsers, and we don’t need more products.” Because maybe they’re using one product and they just want that product to be better. I completely understand that sentiment. I want existing products to be better as well.

But the competitor we’re trying to replace in the world is Google, and we’re not going to win that fight in the long run by being better in just one or two products. The only way we will be competitive in the long run against American tech giants is an ecosystem.

I don’t build an ecosystem because I want to — in fact, that’s a very difficult thing to do and it makes our lives really difficult — it’s a lot easier to sell one product and be very good at it.

I would prefer to do that, but I can’t because it won’t allow us to change the status quo. Changing the status quo forces the ecosystem approach. I don’t like it, and the community doesn’t like it sometimes, but it’s necessary.

It was the same as Proton Mail 12 years ago. I wanted to use AI, but I sure as hell do not trust Sam Altman or Anthropic. I wasn’t going to use Chinese models hosted on Chinese servers either. If we didn’t build Lumo, I wouldn’t be able to enter the AI age.

I think there are many people in the same boat. They want to use AI and understand its importance for the future, but don’t trust any of the players out there.

Lumo is the only AI chatbot where your conversations are actually private. It didn’t exist until we built it.

You could say the same for Gmail — data collection was the main reason Google created Gmail. OpenAI is also pushing ads. But in reality, we are not constrained by their business model; we’re constrained by what is possible and what users actually want.

We showed with Lumo that it’s possible to build private AI services without surveillance capitalism. Surveillance capitalism is an artificial constraint imposed on the world by Silicon Valley, and it’s not actually a real constraint.

In technology, I think performance will be better in the long run for privacy products because we have fewer constraints. Some show ads, whereas an ad-free product is a better product.

Last year, the Swiss government tried to introduce mass surveillance in Switzerland. We and much of the industry opposed it, forcing the government to reconsider.

As a business, you don’t put all your eggs in one basket; you want sufficient diversification so that if policy goes wrong in one country, you’re not in a bad situation.

Moving Lumo outside Switzerland was really a message to the Swiss government that privacy is an asset with real economic value. When we invested hundreds of millions outside the country, it showed these things have economic significance. The conversation shifted, and the economic aspect of privacy began to be considered.

After that decision, the government was obliged to make a regulatory impact assessment, which showed that persisting with mass surveillance would cost CHF 30 to 40 billion over 10 years and would have been the loss of 200,000 jobs. It shows that privacy and trust have massive economic value.

Before asking if you can do it, the question is whether you should do it. And I don’t think we should do it.

The reason is very simple: there’s no such thing as age verification for only children because you don’t know who’s a child and who’s an adult. The only way to age children is to age everyone. And that means essentially showing ID to use the internet. If you follow that logic down, that gets you to a very dangerous place.

So, I don’t think we should do it. But if politicians are determined to do it, are there better and worse ways to do it? Yeah, for sure. The current approach forces everyone to show ID to Facebook, which is Mark Zuckerberg’s dream.

If you want to do it right, it has to be device-only. No data should ever leave the device to go to any centralized server, and any personal information that is scanned or captured needs to sit only on the device and not be saved after the verification is done. That’s a correct way to do it. But social media companies are not incentivized to do it that way.

I think if we don’t expand, we can’t fulfill our mission; but if you expand too fast, you can also die.

However, Proton is not VC-backed. We have a natural financial speed limiter built into our structure. So, the financial blowup that you see in companies that expand too quickly is impossible at Proton due to our structure.

Catching Google is difficult because of their scale and anti-competitive practices. But I do think eventually, we are going to win, and the reason comes down to what the citizens want.

Nine out of ten people prefer Proton’s vision of the internet over Google’s. It may take decades, but I do think people are eventually moving away from Big Tech.