Why do we accept online practices that would horrify us in the physical world? It’s a question that troubles Andy Yen, a Taiwanese particle physicist-turned entrepreneur who wants to challenge the economic paradigm at the heart of big tech.
“Imagine a real-life version of Google; someone who follows you around, recording where you go, making a record of your conversations and putting a camera in every room of your house. You’d never accept that,” he says. “Yet somehow when it moves online, we are OK with that.”
Yen is the founder and chief executive of Proton, which is making inroads in its plan to provide an alternative vision to that of tech giants such as Apple, Meta — owner of Facebook and Instagram — and Alphabet, Google’s holding company.
Its privacy-focused internet services, including end-to-end encrypted email, are used by tens of millions of people but Yen, 34, reckons he would have a much larger business if he could convince more people to share his level of discomfort with what he calls “surveillance capitalism”.
The term refers to mass data collection by tech companies which gets sold on to advertisers. Yen, who spent six years working at Cern, the giant physics laboratory in Switzerland, launched Proton in 2014 to “create a tool I wanted” to bypass this “status quo”.
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“You get a service that’s free by paying with your most private, intimate data. That seemed like a pretty bad deal to me. Even if you’re OK with that [deal], it’s problematic that there’s no alternative. This is about giving people who want to opt out of the system the opportunity to do that.”
Proton has about 70 million users and about 400 staff. Its advisory board includes Sir Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the world wide web. “His vision wasn’t to enable surveillance capitalism. Proton is trying to steer the web back to the founding ideals; enhancing freedom of information and a tool of democracy,” Yen says.
“Our hypothesis is simply that the future is more private. It’s like Elon Musk saying in 2008 that the future of the automobile is electric. It sounded crazy back then. But I believe it’s inevitable when you consider the need for privacy is innate to being human. We have curtains on our windows, locks on our doors.
“As humanity moves online it seems a no-brainer that the future is more private. We want to be there when that happens.”
This week’s €390 million fine for Meta for breaking European Union rules related to the use of personal data for targeted ads suggests Yen is on to something. He has spoken about online privacy rights to the United Nations, lobbied American politicians to introduce competition reforms and asked the EU to better enforce its rules that restrict tech companies’ ability to default to their own services.
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“Companies like Apple and Google take their dominance and suppress competing services,” Yen claims. “[On a Google-linked Android phone] to get ProtonMail you have to use Google’s default app store, for which you need a [Google] Gmail account. So now you’re in the perverse situation that you want to use an alternate, privacy-focused email, you need a privacy-invasive email service to get it.
“That makes it impossible to get traction and market share. Even after you’ve got ProtonMail, the whole ecosystem is trying to take you back to Gmail, from links on Google maps to [Google’s] Chrome as the default browser. It’s absurd.”
He also claims that the 30 per cent cut that Apple takes from app developers trading via its store is such a high proportion of a developer’s initial income that it “creates a strong market incentive for surveillance capitalism”. It does this by pushing more internet services into advertising-funded models rather than the slower but more regular income provided by subscriptions.
While Apple has made changes which it says prioritise privacy, disrupting the online advertising industry in the process, Yen asks: “How can you fight for privacy while having business practices that make it difficult for privacy companies to survive?”
Proton is based in Geneva, a result of Yen’s ties with the nearby Cern. It was launched via a crowdfunding round in which 10,000 people donated SwFr500,000 (£450,000). Since then, it’s largely avoided venture capital, the typical tech financing route, mainly relying on subscription revenues. Its services also include storage, a calendar and a virtual private network, or VPN, to disguise your internet IP address and location.
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“Our only obligation is to the user community. We can make decisions that maybe we wouldn’t be able to do with a venture capital investment,” Yen says. He cites the example of Proton’s decision to temporarily provide its services free of charge to Russian users who lost the ability to pay because of the sanctions that followed the invasion of Ukraine. “It gives you the independence to do what is right rather than just what is profitable.”
While Proton is used by the likes of journalists and activists working under the glare of authoritarian regimes such as those in Russia, Iran and Hong Kong, its users also include millions of citizens who want to see anything that’s “not state media” in such places, Yen says, adding: “It shows how important it is.”
He accepts that Proton will also be used by people with nefarious intentions, but says: “We need to look at the overall social benefit. If we want democracy to survive in the 21st century we need to offer privacy even though it has negative externalities.”
Yen says building Proton isn’t as much of a leap from his former life as a scientist as it might seem: “You do science because you want to work on interesting and hard problems and you hope through your endeavours to create a better world. And those are the motivations for building Proton.”
