The CEO of Proton (Andy Yen) answers all your questions!
At the end of November, I asked the community on mastodon to send me all their questions about Proton Mail, Drive, VPN, Pass, their features, their privacy, and their security. I compiled all of these, and interviewed Andy Yen, the CEO of Proton. I couldn’t ask ALL of the questions, since there were 130 non-duplicates, but over the course of 1h30, we still managed to cover a lot of ground. So, here is the full interview (also available as a video on the Youtube channel if you prefer that). 00:00 Intro 2:11 How did Proton start? 4:18 Why start with email? 6:57 What is Proton’s business model? 9:28 Why set up in Switzerland? 12:28 What data do you have on customers? 15:33 How is encryption important? 19:14 Do you always need to use a VPN? 21:41 Why focus on building an ecosystem? 25:50 Is an Office Suite planned? 27:23 What differentiates Proton from competitors? 31:20 Is Proton a viable alternative to big tech services? 34:26 Why expand to more products instead of finishing existing ones? 38:14 Does the general public care about privacy? 39:40 What’s next for Proton services? 41:02 What are the plans for native Linux clients? 46:57 Will ProtonVPN offer dedicated IPs to everyone? 48:41 What’s the environmental impact of Proton? 50:21 Proton on F-Droid, without Google Play notifications? 52:57 Why are code repos all separated and hard to find? 54:06 Why are addresses ending in “.me” ? 55:51 When will all apps reach feature parity? 57:18 Will SMTP relay be supported? 58:41 Will Proton focus more on businesses in the future? 1:00:44 Why put all your eggs in one basket with just Proton services? 1:02:18 Will Proton support passkeys? 1:04:16 Does E2E matter is the recipient isn’t using it? 1:05:44 Will Proton disable port forwarding in VPN? 1:07:35 Is encryption enough to make email private? 1:10:01 What protects users from a change in Proton’s code licensing? 1:12:08 How does Proton protect its infrastructure? 1:14:09 Impacts of Quantum Computing on privacy and security? 1:15:19 What’s the future of Proton Bridge? 1:17:19 When will Proton photos be a thing? 1:18:11 Plans for Proton Notes? 1:19:14 Will VPN support the Apple TV? 1:22:07 Support the show
