Proton’s CTO: No company is going to jail for you
We’ve got the first of a two-part series on the systems that run the world: I’m talking today with Bart Butler, the CTO of Proton, the company that makes private and secure productivity software.
There’s a lot of big Decoder themes in this one. That includes how Proton has structured its ownership and architected its products to align its incentives with protecting users. At the same time, Proton faces new challenges and pressures, both at home in Switzerland and from the EU and US government that are putting its values to the test.
Links:
Proton now offers an entire bundle of office services | The Verge
Proton Mail helped FBI unmask anonymous ‘Stop Cop City’ protester | 404Media
Proton says it will leave Switzerland if this controversial law Is passed | Vice
Age verification is a mess but we’re doing it anyway | The Verge
Let’s build a children’s public internet | The Verge
Let me see some ID: age verification is spreading across the internet | The Verge
Why Chat Control 1.0 is the EU's most Orwellian law yet | Euronews
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Credits:
Decoder is a production of The Verge and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.
Decoder is produced by Kate Cox and Nick Statt and edited by Ursa Wright. Our editorial director is Kevin McShane.
The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder.
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Your Child's Data Profile Starts Before They're Born | Eamonn Maguire of Proton
Your child's data profile doesn't start when they get their first phone. It starts before they're born, the moment a parent emails a gynecologist or visits a fertility clinic website. That's the core argument behind Born Private, Proton's new initiative that lets parents reserve an email address for their child at birth, anchoring their digital identity in a privacy-preserving ecosystem before the profiling machine gets started. Craig Smith sits down with Eamonn Maguire, Engineering Director, Machine Learning & AI at Proton, who has spent his career at the intersection of data, security, and visualization to explore what's really happening to our data and what, if anything, we can do about it.
The conversation covers the mechanics of how just three email sign-ups can allow Google to infer your age, politics, and religion; why OpenAI and Anthropic have shown "not much regard for the law" when it comes to training data and copyright; and why social media platforms are operating like unregulated gambling companies - engineering addiction with no structural incentive to stop. It's one of the most grounded, specific, and genuinely alarming conversations about digital privacy you'll hear, and it ends with a simple, actionable proposition: privacy should be a decision you make at birth, not a problem you try to solve after the damage is done.
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#339 Eamonn Maguire: Your Child Has a Data Profile Before They're Born
What if your child already has a data profile, and they haven't even been born yet?
In this episode of Eye on AI, Craig Smith sits down with Eamonn Maguire, Director of Engineering for AI and ML at Proton, to explore one of the most urgent and underappreciated questions in the age of AI: who owns your data, who is building a profile on you, and what can actually be done about it?
Eamonn brings a rare combination of depth and range to this conversation. With a PhD from Oxford, a postdoc at CERN, and years at Facebook engineering ML systems to detect internal and external threats, he now leads Proton's AI efforts, including Lumo, their end-to-end encrypted alternative to ChatGPT. He makes a compelling case that the surveillance economy is not just a privacy problem but a behavioral one, where the systems profiling you are not only observing who you are but actively shaping who you become.
We get into how just three data points are enough for advertisers to infer your age, political leanings, religion, and spending habits. We discuss why trusting mainstream AI platforms with sensitive data is a structural problem, not just a policy one, and why the AI labs with the best models got there by acquiring the most data, often with little regard for copyright law. Eamonn also breaks down the difference between truly open models and open washing, and explains how Proton builds AI that is genuinely private by design, with local indexing, encrypted memory, and user-controlled data sharing.
Then there is Born Private, Proton's initiative to give children a private digital identity from birth. It sounds simple on the surface, but the conversation it opens up is anything but. Data collection on your child begins before they are born, the moment a parent emails a gynecologist or a fertility clinic. Eamonn argues that until we start thinking about privacy the way we think about other rights, from the very beginning, the surveillance machine will always have a head start.
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Craig Smith on X: https://x.com/craigss
Eye on AI on X: https://x.com/EyeOn_AI
Timestamp:
(00:00) Introduction and Meet Eamonn Maguire
(00:38) From Bioinformatics to CERN to Facebook: Eamonn's Career Arc
(05:23) How Proton Started in the CERN Cafeteria
(09:23) What Mainstream AI Platforms Actually Do With Your Data
(13:00) Copyright, Training Data, and Why Big Labs Can't Be Trusted
(15:10) Open Models vs Open Washing: What Truly Open AI Looks Like
(24:22) How Lumo Works: Encrypted Memory and No Data Leakage
(31:18) Born Private: Reserving a Private Email Address at Birth
(33:00) How Data Profiling Starts Before Your Child Is Born
(34:26) How Three Data Points Become a Complete Profile
(39:07) Molly Russell and the Consequences of Algorithmic Profiling
(53:55) The Full Proton Ecosystem: Mail, VPN, Drive, Lumo, and Workspace
Is Privacy A Winnable Battle? | Andy Yen, Founder of Proton
AI is becoming the most powerful surveillance machine ever built and most people are feeding it their deepest secrets without realizing who can read them. Proton founder Andy Yen joins Bankless to explain how Big Tech captures your identity, why AI chat logs are a privacy disaster waiting to happen, and what a self-sovereign, user-aligned future could look like.
We explore how AI models profile you, why subscription business models don’t guarantee privacy, how Proton built Lumo without retaining user data, and why encrypted email remains the cornerstone of your digital identity. Andy also breaks down EU “chat control,” Apple’s privacy-washing, the crisis of trust in crypto, and the practical steps anyone can take today to reclaim their digital freedom.
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TIMESTAMPS
0:00 Intro
2:18 Why Privacy Matters More Than Ever
3:24 How Screwed Are We? Andy’s 1–10 Privacy Score
5:43 Who Can Read Your AI Chats?
12:22 Worst-Case Scenarios: AI Breaches & Behavioral Profiles
15:08 AI Knows You Better Than You Know Yourself
16:55 Privacy as a Digital Civil Liberty
20:26 Can Big Tech Ever Offer Real Privacy?
26:28 Why Lumo AI Can Be Private (and Big Tech Won’t Copy It)
31:08 What Lumo Runs On & How It Competes With Frontier Models
35:45 The Case for a Self-Sovereign AI
38:46 How Proton’s Foundation Model Really Works
45:47 Can Private AI Be Sustainable?
49:47 The Full Proton Privacy Stack
54:59 The Messy State of Encrypted Chat Apps
58:49 Browsers, Search, and the Dark Patterns of AI Integration
1:02:53 Are iPhones Actually Private?
1:12:42 The Fight Over Encryption: EU Chat Control & Beyond
1:26:08 “A Backdoor for the Good Guys” — Why It Can’t Work
1:29:42 Financial Privacy = Freedom
1:32:58 Crypto’s Reputation Problem
1:39:24 Practical Privacy: The One High-Leverage Step
1:45:15 Two Futures: One Dark, One Bright
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RESOURCES
Andy Yen
https://x.com/andyyen
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Is It Worth Switching To Encrypted Email And Messaging? — With Andy Yen
Andy Yen is the CEO of Proton, the maker of encrypted email service ProtonMail. He joins Big Technology Podcast to discuss the merits of encryption, why his service has doubled over the past two years, and whether it’s something we actually need. This episode gets into a fun debate, covering both the pros and cons of the movement.
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