Proton is not just a VPN; how the service wants to help you forget Google & cie

The Swiss company Proton, one of the emblems of online privacy protection, continues to develop its services, offering an increasingly credible and mature alternative to the giants of the sector, Google in the lead.

Long requested by its user community, the password manager is becoming a reality at Proton. The “Proton Pass”, that’s its name, is currently only available in beta version, of course, but it will very soon join the galaxy of services already offered by the company focused around privacy and installed in Geneva (with an office which has just opened in Paris, by the way): Mail, Calendar, Drive and VPN, all available in a free or paid version, for more functionalities. At VivaTech, Andy Yen, the founder and CEO of Proton, explained his strategy to us.

Protect passwords, one of the most essential tools for ensuring online privacy »

” We are a community driven business “Andy Yen reminded us at the beginning of our interview, he who manages with skill the company which does not receive income from advertisers. ” Every year we conduct a survey asking our users what they want for the future. And I have to say that over the last four, five or six years, the idea of ​​the password manager came up very often on the table. »

Proton Pass was born. The service, which uses end-to-end encryption to protect its users’ login credentials, is expected to be available to the general public by the end of the year. For now, we have to settle for a beta version.

” What I can say is that this is Proton’s next major product », repeats Andy Yen. ” Encryption is known to have no benefit if you forget your password or lose your password because if someone has access to your password they can bypass the whole procedure… I think so it’s a natural extension for us as a privacy-focused company to protect passwords. It is one of the most essential tools for ensuring online privacy. »

Proton, so far (in policy) and so close (in features) to Google

Proton has also launched, in recent weeks, a “Family” subscription accessible from 19.99 euros per month for a maximum of six users and 3 TB of storage space. ” I think the reception was very good “Judges the boss of the company. ” If you have young children, do you really want Google and the other tech giants to take all the information before they even think of asking for their consent? ? he asks us. ” I think it’s very important to let parents say “I don’t want my kids and their data to belong to these big American tech companies, and I want to have an alternative.” So the Family offer is, I think, a perfect extension of this concept, because what we consider to be the most private are our families. »

When we ask him how to convince people to use the services provided by Proton, Andy Yen does not hesitate to point the finger at two of the biggest giants in the sector. ” If you look a bit in the social and political sphere today, the image, the business models, the ones that Facebook and Google have, are just not good for democracy, not good for society. And we see it with Cambridge Analytica and all the different scandals that have happened. If you don’t have privacy, you really can’t have freedom of speech. And without freedom of expression, in fact, there is no journalism, no independent press, there is no democracy. So privacy is really at the heart of the survival of democracy in the 21^e century. »

The challenge of Proton and some of its competitors driven by the privacy is to remove the technological barrier to entry. And for that, the features, product experience, functionality, and user experience must be exactly the same as what users are used to. ” I think with services like Proton Mail, which have become more mature, we are closer to that “Says the manager, who also does not omit to recall that it has become difficult to dissociate, from the user’s point of view, Proton Mail from Gmail. It remains to be seen how hard habits will die.