‘No company is going to go to jail for you’: Proton’s CTO on balancing privacy, policy, and trust

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Today on Decoder, we’ve got the first of a two-part series on the systems that run the world: I’m talking with Bart Butler, the CTO of Proton, the company that makes private and secure productivity software.

You probably know it best for Proton Mail, which is encrypted by default, but the company also has docs, sheets, a calendar, and even a new AI assistant called Lumo, all built and marketed around the idea that they should be vastly more private than the products from Big Tech companies.

You’ll hear Bart say pretty plainly that the thing Proton sells, at a high level, isn’t really the products themselves, but actually trust. And trust in the software world isn’t only about the people who run the companies, but also the technology they develop and sell and the corporate structure in place to make sure that technology is built against the...

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