GoKawiilToday 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 right incentives. Pure Decoder bait, in other words. The challenge is that Bart also says part of Proton’s mission is very much to succeed at being a viable competitor to Big Tech, and that means the company has to grow and expand to competitive scale, all while preserving its core values.
This philosophy, and that challenge, is baked directly into Proton’s structure and even its physical location — the company and its servers are based in Switzerland, in part because of the Swiss government’s geopolitical neutrality. Two years ago, Proton also transitioned to a nonprofit structure governed by a foundation, which is a familiar model used by all kinds of companies that ostensibly operate in the public interest, but which has failure modes of its own, as we just saw with OpenAI.
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We talked about all of that, but I really wanted to talk to Bart because he’s responsible for the technical construction of some very complex systems that interact with all these complex politics. I really wanted to know how you translate all these lofty ideals and concepts like user trust into real, privacy-centric products and features that can withstand all this policy pressure.
For example, earlier this year, the Swiss government requested payment data that led the FBI to unmask a protester associated with the Stop Cop City movement in Atlanta, Georgia, a request Proton complied with. So of course I had to ask Bart about all that, and what it means that the US government can use words like “terrorism” to coerce foreign governments to apply pressure on Proton — and how the company decides when and how to take on those fights.
This pressure manifests in all kinds of ways. Proton is on the record saying it will leave Switzerland, and Bart says it would also consider ditching its operations in EU countries like Germany and Norway if various surveillance laws working their way through European courts continue to threaten Proton’s privacy mission. Bart told me these aren’t just empty threats and that Proton is in the process of figuring out what it would mean to leave Europe if things get, in his words, more “dystopian.”
There is a whole lot in this one. We ran pretty long because we got so deep in the weeds. We first spent the time talking through the broad frameworks before talking about the very real problems of child safety, age verification, and AI — all of which are testing Proton’s values with some of the highest-stakes problems on the internet today. But we took the extra time to get there, and I hope you’ll think it was worth it.
Okay: Bart Butler, the CTO of Proton. Here we go.
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