The well-known Swiss privacy startup ProtonMail changes its name and wants to go beyond its famous encrypted email service. Now the company is called Protonand offers an entire ecosystem of privacy.
The available products —Proton Mail, Proton VPN, Proton Calendar and Proton Drive— will thus form part of a global solution that users can contract jointly or in parts. In Xataka we have spoken with the CEO of Proton, Bart Butlerwhich tells us about the new stage in which to protect our privacy, yes, it is still the pillar of its platform.
Privacy by flag
Until now Proton offered its services separately, and precisely one of the objectives of this brand change is to propose this new ecosystem with privacy as a defining characteristic.
To this end, Proton now offers new versions of its desktop, mobile and web applications that the user can leverage with a unified Proton account and that it will be a kind of gateway to privacy. The services offered today are the following:
- Proton Mail: the encrypted email service that was the first they launched and that continues to rely on an encrypted system that prevents anyone except the sender and receiver from accessing the message.
- Proton VPN: this platform poses another layer of privacy to protect not only our mail, but all the data transfers that we carry out from our PC or our mobile. The service has a free and more limited version, and a paid version more ambitious and with many more options.
- Proton Calendar: our agenda and calendar is another of the elements that we can protect from prying eyes, and allow us to have a manager for these appointments that integrates perfectly with Proton Mail.
- Proton Drive: this new service is again an alternative to Google Drive, OneDrive or iCloud and allows us to have a private space in the cloud for our documents and files, but it will also allow us to share them with our contacts.
all these tools share a unified interface that makes it easy and intuitive to use them both through the browser and through native applications on our PC or laptop and on our mobile.
These services can continue to be contracted independently with their respective monthly fees. There is a free plan that will allow us to use all these services in a somewhat more limited way, and if we want to get more out of them, we have combined plans that are also interesting economically.
The change of name and updated offers also come with advantages for users, which they will enjoy for example more storage in the plans, but as we say they can combine them all.
Proton Mail continues to be an essential part of Proton’s service offering. All apps, by the way, offer light and dark themes, but also other alternatives.
here the plan Proton Unlimited (9,99 euros al mes) It offers 500 GB of total storage, 15 email addresses, three custom email domains and the full VPN with more than 1,700 servers in 60 countries and support for streaming or even Tor over VPN.
“People want ecosystems”
In Xataka we had the opportunity to speak with Bart Butler, CTO of Proton, and who has been with the company almost since its foundation. He explained to us how the change of name and strategy was a demand from users: “people want ecosystems, things that support themselves and give value to users. That has made us focus on an ecosystem and not on individual products.
Proton Calendar offers a clean and elegant interface.
Butler also explained to us how privacy continues to be the absolute center of this entire strategy. Of course: that privacy and that end-to-end encryption are not entirely identical to what WhatsApp offers, for example.
“E-mail is different, it is based on PGP”, this engineer explained to us. “This privacy technology is proven and constantly being updated – we’re a part of that effort – but it’s also important because PGP is interoperable and that allows you to make it work between different systems.” Butler made a curious analogy: chat is a “walled garden” and not interoperable, while mail is not.
Precisely email, which was and continues to be the center of this entire ecosystem, is a special protagonist of the internet because, as Butler says, “it is universal and it is our identity on the internet”.
There is another key element of Proton’s offering: usability. As the CTO of the company told us, it is important to make a product as secure as possible, but it is equally or more important to make it usable: “you don’t have to know about encryption or what it is”, you just have to know that it is there and that you can use it effortlessly and without any disadvantage.
Future plans
Proton’s future plans include supporting 2FA hardware tokens: devices such as the Yubikey could thus serve to protect our data even more, although we will have to be patient: the unification of services and domains —the new one, proton.me, unifies everyone else—is still going, and if all goes well we may have some good news on that support in the near future.
Proton Drive allows us to have a private and encrypted space in which to keep our data safe in the cloud.
This new strategy made it inevitable to ask Butler about future options in the ecosystem. Will there be a Proton Office, a Proton Search or maybe a Proton Browser?
Butler smiled at the question but obviously didn’t elaborate on whether or not such plans exist. He did acknowledge that all this is in talks about the future of the company.
For him, however, it was important not to be distracted from his focus: “We want to be a competitor of Google and the Big Tech and anything they do is in the long-term goals, but now we are growing a lot and one thing is clear: It is important to be focused on what we do today, that all the functions work well and that, for example, Proton Mail is absolutely complete”.
“Privacy is control”
Another unavoidable question raised the necessary reflection on the state of privacy. In June 2013 Edward Snowden revealed to us a terrible reality in which the massive espionage of the NSA was patent.
That triggered the alarms and triggered the debate about privacy and how to protect it more than ever, but almost a decade later the situation is not particularly rosy.
The scandals surrounding companies like Facebook or Google and data theft are constant, and the truth is that users we tend to succumb to their products because they work well, they allow us to share everything and, above all, they are free.
Butler commented how for him “there is nothing wrong with using Instagram or Facebook, sharing things is one of the most beautiful things on the internet. For me privacy is being in control of who sees your data, in what context and whenand that is totally out of the vision of big tech.”
For him the reality is that people want more privacy and control over their data, “and I think you’d be hard-pressed to find someone who didn’t want that.” That is precisely Proton’s mission, he said, “to get people to control who they share their data with and when. To get people to understand the value of that proposition.”
In fact, he made an interesting comparison: “More and more people are willing to change, because if you offer the same features as Google services but you also offer controlpeople value that control.”
The frequency with which massive data thefts occur makes it necessary to combat that certain fatalism that exists, Butler explained. “It will be increasingly important to have that model that allows you to control your data: the only safe data is the one that you don’t have access to“.
“Google’s customers are not its users, but the advertisers”
It is in this fight that Proton wants to propose an alternative to Google and other services that compete in this segment. When asked what he would highlight about the Proton ecosystem compared to Google’s, he insisted on privacy and control, but also cited something important: the business model.
“Proton makes money by aligning itself with the interests [de privacidad] of the users. Google will never have that same alignment because its business model is not about privacy. Google’s customers are not its users, but the advertisers“.
There are other factors that make an attractive proposal for him: not even they have access to our data, so privacy is once again essential, but they are also committed to transparency in a project that it is also Open Source: “people want to be part of that, to recover the meaning of the internet as it was before, not an internet based on monetization and advertising”.
