ProtonMail

I just finished reading the transcript from the recent TED Talk by Andy Yen on ProtonMail. Wow! I know very little in the grand scheme of things about computer security and privacy, though I expect I know more than the average computer user.

As Yen explains in his talk, our privacy is under attack by big money and advertising interests. I personally have an email account on a very well-known mail platform, and have over 10 years worth of email sitting on it. My account content is undoubtedly a gold mine for the company that runs those servers. In addition to all the content I’ve got stored in my account, there are thousands of emails I’ve deleted. One thing to consider is that even though I’ve deleted my messages on the mail server, that doesn’t necessarily imply that those messages have not already been mined for “interesting” information, or that they won’t be in the future, even though I’ve already deleted them. Just because the user interface to my mail doesn’t present deleted emails to me anymore, doesn’t mean they didn’t exist at one time and can’t be mined.

There is no doubt that if they wanted to and cared to, the mail hosting company, could learn an awful lot about me. More than I even realized about myself.

Yen and his colleagues at ProtonMail have come up with a solution to this problem. They’re still working on scaling it out for a massive audience, but the solution is beautiful: use open source tools and technologies to build a completely private email experience. Host it in Switzerland where governments shouldn’t be able to gain access to it because of jurisdictions. Even if someone wanted to get the data from your email account, it would be useless because it’s encrypted using well-known cryptographic algorithms both in transit and at rest.

If you care about protecting some of your privacy in the digital world, you’ll take a close look at ProtonMail. We all should, at the very least, take some time to consider how much of our privacy we’re willing to give away and whom we’re willing to give it away to.