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- [00:00]
A
Ai like social media is intentionally designed to be addictive in fact some of these ai's will even change the way they talk to you to cater to your personality and sort of what it senses is the sort of answer that you want to hear and that's a really scary thing you mentioned that ai maybe knows you better than some of your best friends i would actually argue that in not so long from now the ai could know you better than even you yourself oh my god a lot of us humans are not so self aware about who we are right ai will actually be able to exploit the weaknesses of personality that even you are not aware of in order to compel you to keep using it and do what it wants.
- [00:45]
B
Welcome to bankless where we explore the frontier of digital privacy this is ryan sean adams it's just me here today so i am here to help you become more bankless the question is privacy a winnable battle this is a very important conversation between myself and andy yen andy is the ceo of proton they are the makers of protonmail i'm sure you've heard of it few things we discuss solving privacy in ai how tech companies are screwing us eu chat control legislation encryption as a civil liberty his views on crypto also i think my favorite part of this episode is that it comes with a little bit of homework there's some level ups and i genuinely want you to consider the homework i want you to consider leveling up your privacy in twenty twenty six like make it a project because going bankless is about freedom and you lose your freedom when you lose your privacy i think a number of factors have accelerated this most notably ai coming on the scene and i want you to accept for a minute the framing of this episode as we get into it what if your ai chatbot isn't your friend what if it's a sycophantic super genius designed by a company to trick you into feeding it more data and then using that data to gain more leverage over you even if that's a little bit true don't you think it's concerning there are ways to opt out and we explore them in today's episode let's get right to it so bankless nation there is a confluence of things happening in the world right now there was a coinbase data breach earlier this year that leaked customer email address information phone number information i know the crypto industry has been hit with in real life attacks on crypto people and particularly those who haven't been able to keep their information private we live in a world of ai tools we don't know what they're doing with the data like what is chatgpt doing with the data i don't feel like i have much control i have personally adopted the entire proton stack i've done this lately to drastically improve my privacy and security posture and i think every crypto user should go investigate it and take a look at it so all this to say it's a very good time to have an episode with the co founder of proton andy welcome to.
- [03:08]
A
Bankless hey thanks for having me it's a pleasure to be here and i think between the world of crypto the world of encryption which you're in and the world of privacy a lot of intersection so hopefully we'll have a fun conversation to go through some of these pretty important topics as you say very.
- [03:22]
B
Important topics and definitely some common cause so you are the founder of proton this is one of the world's largest consumer digital privacy companies i believe there's a hundred million users of proton worldwide on a scale of one to ten i feel like you're the perfect person to ask so andy on a scale of one to ten how screwed are we on digital privacy today for a normal person they're using the typical web stack of gmail they've got an iphone instagram whatever chatgpt how screwed are they.
- [03:50]
A
I think it really depends on who you are right the average person is probably quite screwed if i'm being completely honest and i would say the more technical sophisticated people are have more means to protect themselves but it's going to become harder and harder as you know if the current trends go on so what we see actually people talk about ai and i think you mentioned ai as well and what ai is actually doing is it's simply an extension of a trend that's been going on for fifty years because fundamentally ai is it's actually a better and more efficient way for humans to communicate with computers and so it's not dramatically changing any of our business models but actually it's accelerating the existing models that already exist so if you think about search the information that you give into google search which allows google to build a very detailed profile about who you are well an ai conversation with say gemini that is way more intimate that is getting much more information about you so what google is able to do is they're probably able to accelerate by a factor of five or ten their existing business model with the advent of ai and this is something that is happening you know sort of across the board so then it becomes harder and harder because ai now becomes a central tool of our lives it's everywhere so do you live in the stone age so to speak from a tech perspective or do you participate in the acceleration of the loss of our privacy globally and this is why i think in some extent the average person who doesn't have any knowledge of this is pretty screwed they can't take means to protect themselves but if you're aware then you can do something the problem is i would say probably eighty percent of the population ninety percent of the population simply doesn't understand some of the issues that we talk about you know for example on this show.
- [05:35]
B
Well this episode is definitely for awareness but also i hope toward the end we prompt to some action some small steps maybe and first steps you could take because privacy is definitely a journey but there are some steps you can take that are relatively easy and you can start them now and then you can keep improving over time that's the journey that i've been on personally but since you brought up ai again let's talk about ai so chatgpt tools like gemini if i'm using a chatbot type tool like something like chatgpt who can see my chats so can employees at these companies see them can the government see them are they subpoena bowl are they like open to everyone or is it like only under certain circumstances kind of like they break the glass in order to to get access to the chats who who gets access to this.
- [06:22]
A
Unfortunately it's part of all of the above and that's kind of the scary thing right so let's let's break that down piece by piece of course tech companies can see it because they are recording and essentially you know analyzing and saving every single conversation you ever have so everything you ever type in is being recorded and more or less permanently retained like the way they are they're.
- [06:47]
B
Not anonymizing it they're not doing something to kind of mix it in because.
- [06:51]
A
You'Re logged in it's it's your user id and they're actually looking at this information because that is how they try to improve these programs so it's there and they actively look at it and they use it because that is part of their business and it's also being used to profile you and send you advertisements and in the case of chatgpt even shopping recommendations so they can tell you what to buy and recommend your products and you can actually directly buy them through chatgpt now right so the companies definitely see all of that now the thing about what that implies is anything that a company has it's actually obliged to give up to law enforcement so the fbi asks for if the feds come asking for it if any police or prosecutor requests it that information is also available the government has access to this information but a private party that sues you can also get access to information and there's also in fact a famous you know new york times case where new york times i think sued openai and as part of the lawsuit they you know tried to require openai to actually retain all the conversations because they wanted to use those you know conversations as evidence in their lawsuit against openai so that's the thing now what is even worse sometimes is then there's also the inadvertent breaches that happen when you give something to you know into openai in chatgpt you're actually contributing to the knowledge of chatgpt so the information that you give it becomes part of its brain so to speak and if it's talking to somebody else there's actually a very real possibility and in fact quite high likelihood that information that you've given it can then be regurgitated out and shown to somebody else as part of another conversation because that information is now in the corpus information that is used to train and give answers to these models and that has happened right if you put a password into chatgpt and someone's very smart in prompt engineering they can get chatgpt to spit out the information that you gave it on accident and then of course there's also bugs i think there was a couple examples of data breaches where an ai company accidentally left something open and revealed all the chats or sometimes the chats were i think there's even one case where the chats were accidentally opened and indexed by google in which case anybody can get access to them and that's the nature of information once you put it out there it's out there you cannot really take it back you may be able to sometimes force them to delete it but that may or may not be too late depending on your threat model so unfortunately the answer is it's all the above in that whole list of things that you gave me because when you put it into chatgpt it is unfortunately no longer your.
- [09:36]
C
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- [11:35]
A
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- [12:02]
B
Pioneers of defi what would be the worst case okay let's talk about data breaches for a minute because at the beginning of the episode i talked about a data breach that happened to coinbase which revealed a lot of customer aml kyc type of information so this would be like you know name email address physical location all of the personal data if something like google gemini or chatgpt had a data breach maybe this at the level of sophistication maybe this would be a well funded state actor or something or like i don't know there are some parties that could probably do this type of thing what's the worst case scenario would they really have access to every like user's logs chat logs and be able to leverage that in.
- [12:45]
A
The future yeah they would have your chat logs and depending on what you say to chatgpt that could be quite compromising and you know there are some people today who use chatgpt for relationship advice for personal advice it is their psychologist it is maybe even their virtual girlfriend or boyfriend as the case may be the information that you give at chatgpt is incredibly intimate it's literally a private conversation with somebody who in some cases is your best friend and that is all potentially legal accessible subpoena able and also available to hackers as well.
- [13:18]
B
There'S been a scaling of this since since you started proton i believe in the early days of you know it was twenty thirteen or so twenty fourteen twenty fourteen twenty fourteen okay so long time ago but we have put more and more in digital format so you know back in twenty fourteen it would be the most sensitive thing i could imagine for myself online would probably be my email address maybe my search history now in twenty twenty five it would be everything that i've ever said to chatgpt or that it's been able to divine somehow you know depending on my usage pattern of chatgpt i mean there's a real case for many users of these ai tools that the ai's know them better than most of their closest relationships in their lives like they know everything about them and they can also divine things about them based on particular patterns so can you talk about that like as we are increasingly going into the digital age it seems like we are giving more and more to the machine and i guess if knowledge and information is power then the machines become much more powerful or the corporations that control those machines become much more powerful relative to the people like i almost feel helpless with this and i know i could stop using it at any time and yet it is so useful for everyday life and to create economic output that that's not an option for me or most people listening to this can you talk about that ai like.
- [14:46]
A
Social media is intentionally designed to be addictive in fact you know some of these ai's will even change the way they talk to you to cater to you know your personality and sort of what it senses is is the sort of answer that that you want to hear and that's a really scary thing you mentioned that ai maybe knows you better than some of your best friends i would actually argue that in not so long from now the ai could know you better than even you yourself a lot of us humans are not so self aware about who we are right ai will actually be able to exploit the weaknesses of personality that even you are not aware of in order to compel you to keep using it and do what it wants because what is the purpose of something like chatgpt and gemini well at the end of the day it's engagement they want you to keep using it it's sort of a hamster wheel that once you get on they never want you to come off so it is designed to tell you what you want to hear to keep you coming back and to ultimately make you dependent that is not a bug that's actually the core feature of.
- [15:46]
B
This product and we've seen this play out with social media algorithms which were just basically ai light yes but social.
- [15:53]
A
Media when you do it you sort of understand it's public in the back of your mind you know if i share something on facebook i'm sort of expecting people to see it but in ai it's like a chat which we assume by default is private but actually it isn't and this is why i do think it's it's quite scary the consequences of this and it's of course the machine knowing about you but it's who controls the machine and who controls the machine are giant corporations that they don't really have your best interests at heart they're here to make money and they're here to make as much money as possible by exploiting your data and by exploiting you ultimately that's why privacy.
- [16:31]
B
Is very much tied it's sort of it's a political idea isn't it it's very much tied because what we're describing is a world where there is great power asymmetry and the large corporations with the information chatbots and data centers they have all the power and the individual citizens and the individual users don't have that power and so privacy is part of that's what we'll talk about a bit more but privacy is part of correcting that power asymmetry i mean do you see privacy as almost like a modern day digital civil liberty it is.
- [17:10]
A
And it's also a fundamental human rights so privacy in many ways is our last defense against the you know encroachment of surveillance capitalism which today dominates the world if you look at the largest companies on the stock exchange globally by market cap they are really all companies who are actively engaged in ai that is the biggest business and the market cap of these companies added together is bigger than most countries right you add them up you get for example you take a top two or three companies that's bigger than the gdp of germany so we are really at this stage where these companies have gotten so big that they're actually probably in many cases more powerful more influential than even governments themselves so the ability of governments to even regulate these companies is quite limited we think often about oh we used to think about privacy as we need privacy and encryption to serve as a last safeguard against the encroachment of power of government on our individual freedoms but these companies today are bigger and more powerful than most governments so you can almost say that the government part is irrelevant it's the corporates that are probably even worse in many cases and government actually in some sense at least in a democratic world is supposed to serve the will of the voter so you have some control over that but for an openai or google your vote doesn't count you don't have a vote so it's actually even worse let's talk about.
- [18:48]
B
Ai maybe a bit more because i was starting to get some glimmers of hopes when you listen to some of the ceo's and when chatgpt first came on the scene it was actually refreshing to see a subscription based business model for me who's like i'm very aware of surveillance capital and kind of the the google type ad you know like the model where they're harvesting your eyeballs and mining your information that's how they monetize you it was great to see chat gpt and it was a subscription service so i was like okay we're going to monetize this in a different way then i started to see like you know months later and years later the tremendous amount of capex that is being spent by openai and all of these models and when you kind of run the math i don't see how it's possible to sustain that level capex and investment from a subscription based model just because advertising and being able to take out all of the information about individuals and and and and groups and segments and then sell them something based on that it's got to be always a more revenue producing and more profitable endeavor and so i've even seen chatgpt pivoting towards that there there was one other thing that gave me some hope and i want you to comment on all of this but sam altman said recently that he wished that chatgpt and ai models had more privacy and more confidentiality he said that unlike a doctor or lawyer we probably need legal protections because chatgpt doesn't have that but we're we're sending it information we're having conversations as if we were talking to a doctor or lawyer and those classes are protected you know you got attorney client privilege and that sort of thing we don't get that with chatgpt and so he was pushing for more privacy regulation in that direction i haven't seen any of that legislation come forward but it was nice to hear him at least acknowledge that there is a privacy problem anyway take all of this do you think that there is a world where the existing ai companies and maybe the governments can come together and say okay no this is this is too much there need to be some privacy regulations here or maybe the ai companies decide not to monetize our data for advertising and it's a subscription service and it works a bit more like like proton.
- [21:03]
A
Does i think a subscription doesn't mean that they will not violate your privacy because no no honestly from like like a bit take on your perspective if i can you know trick this person into giving him his data for free but i can also make him pay me for that privilege why wouldn't i do both right yeah this golden optimistic here will actually pay me to abuse this data hell i'll take the money i'm not gonna leave the money on the table right and i'll also harvest.
- [21:32]
B
His eyeballs and sell him some ads.
- [21:34]
A
Do all of the above find out we can collect even more money and that's what these business are about it's all about money so fundamentally it's a question of business model the business model here is monetization at all cost these are profit driven companies that care only about profit and they will squeeze a dollar out of you any way they can so they're happy to take your social money and abuse your data at the same time and this is what they do so subscription i think is not a close enough safeguard to say that you know it's private it really you have to go down to the business model the business ethics also what the business stands for that's the key thing now i think sam is talking about oh you know it'd be great to have some government regulations around privacy etcetera etc he's probably more thinking about his new york times lawsuit right he wants the government to protect him from you know third parties subpoenaing his information that he's collecting so what he's basically saying is i want regulation to ensure that the only person that can abuse your data is me and nobody else right that's effectively what he's saying so it's regulation in sort of a let's say very self serving way right he's definitely not asking oh let's have regulation that prevents me myself from abusing your data he just wants everybody else to be locked out of his ecosystem so he can have a monopoly on you know your information and that's right so yeah i wouldn't say that just because he says that he's actually going to go in that direction because history has proven over again and sam's a known quantity right he's been in the valley for a long time people know what he's about by now andy would you.
- [23:02]
B
Go as far as maybe my intuition did and say that the only way ai companies are going to be able to show some return on investment for all the capex they're spending is the surveillance capital business model that's the only way you can actually make investors whole and continue paying for the chips and data centers and energy i think in.
- [23:25]
A
The long run so here's the interesting thing about ai and sort of all technology shifts in computing there's a concept called moore's law are you familiar with what moore's law it's basically that computing power doubles every eighteen months and somehow it's amazingly held up for the last thirty years it's a bit similar with ai ai as a technology is going to rapidly commoditize what would today cost maybe a billion dollars to train may in five six years time only cost ten million so i think there's two sides one is the cost of ai is going to go down probably exponentially with time so these giant cost projections that people are putting out today of how much it costs to build ai that may not even be true they may say oh it's a trillion dollars but that could end up being only a hundred million a hundred billion over time so it's so i do think there is a way to make the business model work over time this this i think is we could say it's pretty we can be pretty confident about that but i do think some of the promises that have been made and advertised today in terms of how much money we're going to spend how much we're going to invest how much we're going to build those are unrealistic not grounded in reality and the businesses today most a businesses are highly unprofitable and that's okay in the early phase but at some point investors are going to want to return and investors may want these returns before the costs have dropped far enough on the exponential scale and then you enter into a situation where these companies might be under increasing pressure to generate as much money as possible and this is why chatgpt gets into shopping it gets into promoting different things to you this is why they get into browsers so they can track your browsing activity and pop up other things to sell you things because they're under this pressure to generate money but i do think long term the business model works it's just going to take a while and these companies may not have so long so they're forced to be increasingly aggressive in abusing their data and unfortunately that's their business and this is why when proton we built our luma ai we did it in a different way because we realized that actually you need to have a different business model or else it simply is going to lead to really bad outcomes for the.
- [25:43]
B
Users let's talk about the differences maybe between luma and some of the existing so luma is proton's lumo lumo n to the o lumo lumo is proton's ai and it preserves all privacy encrypts all data let's say sam altman or sundar from google they listen to this interview and they call your bluff and they say no andy's got the wrong idea this was never about surveillance capitalism this was like we always want to kind of like protect users could they just turn on encryption and have none of their employees have access to any of the data and have none of it be subpoenable and would that be legal is there anything technically or legally preventing them from just flipping a switch or at least in user preferences allowing users to say hey i want all of this to be fully encrypted and.
- [26:38]
A
Private yeah there's no technical limitation in fact that prevents us from doing what we're doing what really prevents it is business model limitation and if we're being completely frank it's a problem of capitalism capitalism drives them to make the highest possible profits and proton of course being predominantly owned by nonprofit doesn't have those same type of constraints but there's no technical barrier to say why you couldn't do the same thing as lumo is there any legal barrier there's also no legal barrier as well in fact okay.
- [27:08]
B
So governments around the world aren't saying hey we need subpoena rights just in case we're dealing with someone who is cooking up a bio device that's going to kill thousands of people well depends.
- [27:21]
A
On the government russia and china would definitely have those requirements but in the us here in switzerland here in europe we thankfully are not there yet i say yet because it's harder tell the future but we're at least not there yet let's put it that way so what lumo does that is quite unique is number one we don't keep a record of any of your conversations anything that is in your chat history is encrypted in a way that we cannot decrypt so we are technically prevented from accessing your history number two we don't use any of your conversation or any of your prompts to do model training and refinement so there's no chance that your information kind of gets leaked out and that also means that number three our staff don't read your conversations because they can't and if we can't get access to your information it means the government coming with a subpoena or a court order even if fully legal well we cannot disclose information that we ourselves don't have access to and so it's sort of the only chat bot ai chatbot who are there is a strong technical guarantee that your conversation stays private and that is what is different and back to your point google could technically build a similar system they just don't have the economic or business model incentives to do so because their business model is flipped you know i'm a subscription business and i take all of my money directly from subscribers and that means that my incentives are aligned with our customers our customers pay us because we're private and the instant we're not private they stopped paying us so i have a financial incentive to keep doing that but if you use google you're not actually google's customer you're the product they're selling to the real customer which is the advertiser and that is a misalignment of incentives which is never going to really put any real pressure to compel them to protect their privacy because protecting your privacy unfortunately goes against their fundamental business interests you know google used to.
- [29:16]
B
Have this expression like don't be evil and i think in crypto we adopted this expression can't be eagle evil yeah because this is what encryption really allows us to do and i want to ask you so when you're talking about the chats you don't have access to them so just to be clear they're fully encrypted and you have no way to access proton has no way no employees of proton no government subpoenas have any ability to actually decrypt the encrypted conversations is that correct yeah so we.
- [29:47]
A
Talk about lumo your chat history is saved but it's encrypted in a way that we cannot decrypt it so it's encrypted essentially with your private key that we don't have access to we just have an encrypted copy of that that you know we cannot decrypt and that is the technical difference and by the way it's all open source so people can take a look and see how it works but yes your history you know whatever sense of discussions that you have had with lumo that's your data and we cannot get access to it.
- [30:12]
B
Very cool all right what model does luma run under the hood we use.
- [30:17]
A
All of them so you know but only open source models we're strict on open source models so we have basically for example we have models of mistral we even have actually openai's open source model we've got the chinese open source models as well like the deep seqs yes yes and kimik too you know those models like that but of course then we bring them in we modify them and we make sure actually we use the best model for every single query and this is important because all the models have their own biases so if you were to ask a chinese model certain questions it wouldn't give you let's say the correct answer right sure and we ensure that we do give the correct answer and we also try to be as neutral as possible we don't want to be a right wing model we also don't want to be a woke model so we try to train and calibrate our systems to be sort of let's say as neutral as we can with as few biases as possible and this is something that you know we actively do the open source.
- [31:15]
B
Models are pretty fantastic i mean is the case that they're close to kind of what the frontier models close source models are actually providing if a user was switching maybe from gemini or chatgpt to to lumo would they notice anything would they like lose any what would they lose like i think one of the ways chatgpt has people locked in is now has kind of a memory of all of their chats and so it can recall context it's also very like the interface works fantastic it's very easy to use how about lumo is how closely is it able to replicate all of the bells and whistles of some of these frontier chats well lumo's.
- [31:57]
A
Been on the market for five or six months and these guys have let's say been on now at this point for over three years so we'll always be a little bit behind let's say the cutting edge because we simply haven't been around as long right but as you say what is interesting about the ai revolution is the gap between the best open and the proprietary is really really quite small and that means that even if we're not one hundred percent of the way there it's actually pretty close and we're quickly adding the feature set to complete the basic feature so you talk about memory memory is something that actually working on right now that is probably going to come to lumo within the next month or two we have a major release essentially every two months and it's a field that is improving very rapidly so i think it's a gap that we close and it's a gap that is pretty easy to close because of how good open source solutions are in this particular tech revolution which is quite rare when it comes to tech revolutions overall and i think that's quite important on the topic of memory and sort of personalization in fact there is a possibility for you to personalize lumo you can tell lumo how you want to talk to you and how you want to respond but there are certain features that we are going to decline to copy because we don't think they're right for society so i don't really want lumo to begin to change its answers and behave differently because of inferences it has made about your personality you can do that optionally if that's what you really want by opening up the personalization and instructing it to do that but by default it's not going to do that because i want to avoid some of the you know some of the filter bubble stuff that.
- [33:36]
B
We had on social media manipulation that's what we call it in a human.
- [33:39]
A
Relationship yes yeah yes yes yes manipulation right i want to avoid some of the manipulation because i think that's harmful and you know social media the problem was if you were on the left it kept feeding you more you know left content and it made you more and more extreme it did the same to people on the right and then we live now in a completely polarized world and then we wonder why right so i think lumo and ai responsibly it should not cater and try to reinforce our worst impulses even if that gives higher engagement it should actually try to do more to steer people in society towards the center to seeing both points of views and that means i would say probably less personalization by default because personalization is what gives rise to a lot of that so some people say oh well but you know the fact that you don't do this is a bug it may be let's say a product bug but it's probably a feature for society and this is a trade off that we try to get.
- [34:34]
B
Correct i think it's a long term feature for the individual person too right i mean a lot of kind of social media the dopamine so all of these things the sycophancy from from these chat it's not good for people over the long it might feel good in the moment and might cause you to spend more time with the chatbot but it's not necessarily good for your overall well being right this is really gets back to kind of what i think we all need and what we want from ai and what i'm not sure that we will get at the end of the ai rainbow with with some of the large companies pursuing this is i want a individual ai and hopefully at some point an agi that protects my best interest and works for me and represents me and doesn't work for some other company and doesn't try to manipulate or harvest me or sell me something or use me for some sort of purpose or influence me like if an ai is trained as a lawyer let's say i want to be able to trust my ai as that lawyer i want it to work for me on behalf of me to protect my civil liberties in a court case i could tell it confidential information it's not going to rat me out you know and every individual i think actually needs that protection in a world where everybody large companies are going to have all of these ai's like that's how you actually make it democratizing and i'm not sure that the path that chatgpt and google have for us is going to end up with a self sovereign ai that sort of works on behalf of the user yeah it doesn't get there.
- [36:16]
A
Because it's not profitable enough it's not their business model fundamentally and the reason why at proton we transform the business into being having a nonprofit as its biggest shareholder is because that is the way in which you resolve this conflict so it's kind of funny because you can sort of see intentions from direction of travel sam allman has spent the last three years trying as hard as possible to stop being a nonprofit whereas proton went the other direction and actually went from a for profit company that could have stayed for profit into something that was primarily owned by nonprofit and i think that speaks a lot about intentions of course but you need to have that structure that is the essential structure you need to have in order to ensure that you can carry out sort of the vision that you spoke in the long run and a foundation structure really puts what is mandating is it's a legal structure that obliges you to put society's interests above financial self interest and this is the basis of a nonprofit foundation under swiss law and that's a key i think innovation from business model standpoint because it gives you the flexibility and the freedom actually to make the decision that is good for the customer but maybe not always best for the bottom line let's talk about.
- [37:32]
B
That so in crypto we're actually familiar very much with foundations and a notable foundation i think that comes to mind is the ethereum foundation and i think they might be actually registered in switzerland.
- [37:44]
A
As well they're all here they're all.
- [37:46]
B
Here they're all here okay okay and so just like you guys i guess maybe let's talk about the pros and cons of that so model the foundation like many of the benefits that you said sometimes the disadvantages can be they can get stuck in bureaucracies they can't move as fast as companies they're not as well funded they're not as aggressive they can't get maybe the talent from outside that they need and so when you talk about lumo being sort of a self sovereign ai that you'll works on behalf of its user i want lumo to be very well funded because i want it to be a good product i want it to be a better product than chatgpt and in order for it to be a better product you need the resources to hire the talent to make it a better product and you also need the business model that supports it right the thing with ai is inference costs are high the compute costs are high and i can see where a protonmail kind of works on a subscription based model because that's you know relatively static and it's you know storage whatever costs are low when you get to ai i mean does a twenty dollars a month subscription even pay for ai when i'm going to be cranking on the thing and you know boosting up your server costs so can you talk about the model yes and then how that fits in the foundation to make something like this sustainable.
- [39:05]
A
So maybe a popular opinion among your audience but i would actually reject a bit the comparison with the crypto foundations because if we're being let's say completely frank a lot of the crypto foundations that were created in switzerland and this was a lot of them in twenty seventeen around sort of the ico era we call it yes i mean let's be honest most of those are scams right many of them were the vast majority and these foundations were not here for social benefit right these foundations were created because it was a convenient legal structure to legally launder large amounts of money received from unwitting investors who ninety nine percent of the time were defrauded at the end of the day so i actually felt it was a bit of a mistake for switzerland to cater to this business but it was early days they didn't realize a lot of those things happened and some of these foundations are still around they're still around having cash out tons of money to the founding teams and then what happened they went off and they did things that ultimately didn't have utility ethereum maybe is kind of one of the rare exceptions where i suppose some value was created but a lot of these promised you know we're going to have this new blockchain to do this thing that will transform the world and then it's vaporware it hasn't shown up and they've just been sitting around collecting salaries year over year not shipping anything and these networks are dead yeah but proton you.
- [40:32]
B
Guys had your opportunity to launch a coin in twenty seventeen and you did.
- [40:35]
A
We did we did you know the problem the problem is we had all the bankers and lawyers in zoop we're in geneva so we're not in the ecosystem but switzerland same country right they all they all showed up and said oh you know we're going to do this great ico for you you're not going to have to give up any equity you're going to create a new you know token or coin or a blockchain and you have to resist this and then we promise you at least one hundred you know million and some of these things are raising billions you have a big brand you can do all this and it was like wow this is great actually i went to zoo in fact because i was intrigued and like if someone offers you a billion you got to go and hear them out right yes so i went there and i went for the board and of course it was tempting and they were signing entrepreneurs up left and right every single day but i realized like if i go down this path what you're essentially asking me to do is defraud the customers in the community that has put great trust in the business for essentially personal gain and it was something that was simply incompatible with what the protocol stands for it's something that is incompatible with my values i could not personally do it so we refused and then people looked at us like we were idiots like okay yeah why are these people so stupid these people are raising one hundred million left and right and these guys are going to sit here and struggle in geneva barely having any money to get by and trying to grow the business we look like idiots right but in retrospect i think it was the right thing to do because it just wasn't correct it was simply a fraud and we didn't want to be involved in that at all now what makes i think the production structure different so first of all it's not credit to defraud people this is number one thing and the assets of the foundation didn't come from outside investors or users who put money in that wasn't what we did right but you're correct it has to be sustainable this is the key thing you know a foundation technically doesn't doesn't have a profit interest but if all your revenue is coming from a couple of donors guess what you're in the pocket of those donors you work for those donors and this is why proton has what i call a hybrid structure it's not purely a foundation actually it's a foundation as a bigger shareholder of a for profit company because profit still needs to be there but this is sort of a self fulfilling prophecy in that the two sort of reinforce each other and the way it works is the company does not have to take decisions that are bad for users because it's not going to come under pressure from its primary shareholder a nonprofit to do that because a nonprofit actually cannot do that and if the company were to go out and let's say tomorrow we decided to go into savannah's capitalism business model well the foundation as the controlling shareholder is just going to block that and that's the end of that right it's never going to happen so the foundation actually gives the company the freedom to do the right thing but the foundation has as its asset actually a big shareholding in a highly profitable business and that means the foundation doesn't need to go out you know with a pen to beg for money to save itself it can collect the money from the company to operate on its own and that means the foundation is actually independent completely independent of any outside force and so i think it's a it's sort of a novel structure if it was just a company it wouldn't work it was just foundation also wouldn't work but the combination of the two of them together with this shareholding structure this gives us a solution that is i say it's a self reinforcing and that is what we did that was really kind of innovative from a business setup standpoint it hasn't actually been done before there were really i think very few examples of this so i'm under some pressure because if we fail then we've shown the world that this model doesn't work if we succeed hopefully others will say hey you know i can do business differently this worked for proton it could work for us and i think this is the future of how you get to responsible capitalism that's fantastic and.
- [44:27]
B
I do wish sam altman listens to this episode because that would be instructive in his organization of openai although that ship has probably sailed but that ship.
- [44:35]
A
Has sailed for them yes yeah okay.
- [44:37]
B
You said highly profitable so you're indicating that proton is highly profitable right now specifically when it comes to the lumo model so in kind of the ai feature set that seems somewhat different than some of the other subscription offerings at proton in that it has some higher variable cost when i'm pounding inference on your model how is that priced and how do you expect to make that.
- [45:01]
A
Sustainable proton has from the beginning always been involved in unsustainable businesses that we're allowed to continue because we have stakeholders who are not purely profit driven and i'll give you kind of an example of this we today have one of the world's largest free vpn services and unlike most free vpn's which monetize your data and abuse your privacy to make money our free vpn is in fact not monetized doesn't log doesn't track does it even have a bandwidth limit right you can use it for as much as you want there's no limit but not only that we also spend millions of euros every year in building r and d to ensure this vpn works in russia and works in iran and by the way these are two countries which are under sanctions so even if these users wanted to upgrade to pay us they can't because there's no paypal there's no you know credit cards you.
- [46:00]
B
Know they're not cryptocurrency you lots of.
- [46:02]
A
Crypto yeah they locked out of the bank and said yeah they can fit in crypto but that's that's kind of let's say a small percentage population right so we're actively investing millions to be present in a market where there is no prospect for monetization because legally it would be illegal for them to pay us so that's a clearly money losing business and lumo well it's a bit early to for to see in lumo but you know so so i may yet turn a profit at some point but i guess the point is we don't need to turn a profit on all of our businesses because we are not under pressure to do that right if i was backed by vc's they would have told me years ago kill off your russian business this is stupid this is a waste of money i get that yeah and you saw all the western companies simply left russia when they couldn't collect money anymore because that was the prudent business thing to do but our structure allows us to engage in activities in business lines that are not profitable have maybe very little prospect of being profitable but are aligned with our mission and are good for the world and this is why i do want people to pay for lumo if you're a happy lumo user please pay us right even even though you're not obliged to do it because we also have a free version of it it's.
- [47:17]
B
Subscription based.
- [47:20]
A
Yeah there's a paid version but let's say the free version is pretty good like all of our products are probably too good to be honest right but that is our mission our core mission is to make privacy accessible i don't want privacy to be a luxury good this is maybe apple's model right although they don't really believe in privacy privacy for them is just marketing i think privacy is a fundamental human right that needs to be available for everybody it can't be a luxury good and i want it to be open for anybody that needs it and that comes at a cost but it's a cost that proton is willing to pay and we are very fortunate to be positioned that we're able to pay that because we do have other paying customers who make us profitable and they are essentially subsidizing the other parts of the business that today do not make money and cannot make money yeah just for.
- [48:06]
B
People listening this because i think they might be intrigued by the proton ecosystem what is the full suite of everything you guys offer just like line iteming kind of the product this used to.
- [48:16]
A
Be so easy i used to say we do email and we do vpn.
- [48:19]
B
And then that's it yeah and that's that's when i last so last time i checked on proton it was probably like you know four or five years ago and you like i have just basic email and then i went back this year and i was like okay i'm going to refocus on my privacy and i was amazed by the slew of services that you now have and actually how much better everything has gotten i mean it truly is proton truly is just like as good as gmail and i don't notice a big difference so you've you've made some big strides on the on the product side but.
- [48:50]
A
What'S everything you offer it's actually been incredibly difficult because you have to get the existing products better and better but then people today don't really think about tech as products tech is actually ecosystems products don't really exist on their own anymore that's right so you must build the rest of the ecosystem out so we have of course email then we built calendar there's also the vpn service there's proton drive but proton drive itself is smaller products so there's proton drive there's some photos capability on drive there's also a proton docs which is like prism it's like the whole g suite.
- [49:22]
B
Basically you're replicating only its private encrypted.
- [49:25]
A
Exactly there's you know there's proton sheets which is the you know excel equivalent or the google sheets equivalent but then there's also more things as well there's also the password manager and i think it's honestly the best free password manager because again we're not so concerned on monetization and then when you build a password manager we had demand for a two factor authentication app that was actually open and secure so there's actually a proton authenticator really rather than google auth you have the proton authentication yes and there's also even a bitcoin wallet proton wallet as well yes yes yes right and then there's lumo which is our privacy focused ai and something that is in beta but not yet released is actually a proton meat which is sort of a zoom competitor that is intended.
- [50:06]
B
Crypto i love this yeah you guys are it's fantastic it's fantastic to see.
- [50:10]
A
The growth here yeah well i'm glad people appreciate it because it is not easy to do so many things at the same time and i don't want to do them for the sake of doing them right i want to do them and do it well i know i may not be able to do it perfectly well in year one or year two but i do eventually want all of these products to be best in class and that takes probably a decade in general because that's how long it takes to mature a product but we are committing on each part that we release to actually make it eventually best in class and it's a lot of complexity it's a lot of hard work i can't tell people that a lot of times as the organization gets bigger you sort of have more free time you can relax a little bit you can have a little bit less stress it's simply not true at proton because the complexity continues to increase as you get bigger and bigger but i'm excited to do it because it's something that's exciting for me and i think for the team but it's also something that we owe the community and this has to go back to the history of proton many people sort of forget about this but proton started through a crowdfunding campaign it was people ordinary citizens and users many of them in fact from the crypto and bitcoin space who took their hard earned money and made a crazy bet on a phd student a bunch of phd students think about.
- [51:30]
B
A very wholesome ico that's what this was except there was no token right.
- [51:33]
A
Yeah there was no token but actually it was a crazy bet because it wasn't even a speculative investment right they didn't get equity product what they got was a promise that when we eventually built a product if we built a product they would have a credit to use to subscribe to the product that at the point they gave them money still didn't exist yet and was being built by people who had no track record of building a product with any success so i'm very very thankful and very grateful to those initial users who took that crazy leap of faith in us and i think we need to keep working for those customers because they have put their faith in us and we need to show hopefully eventually that we have earned that trust they put in us and that's why we keep pushing and that is i think a very strong motivation to also keep going and also because i think we are doing the right thing i think our vision of what the internet should be is the correct one and i believe most people out there if you ask them do you believe more in sam altman's vision of the future or google's vision of the future or proton's vision of the future they do align with our vision so it's encouraging to know that i think most people out there would support and back what we're doing and that really keeps us going and that keeps us driven even after all this time to keep going as fast as possible to build more and more things and lose more sleep because we're doing too many things at the same.
- [53:03]
B
Time one thing you didn't mention and i don't want to add more pressure product pressure to you but here's another is peer to peer chat so you know kind of i think about tools i use every day telegram for instance discord for instance i noticed x added a new chat feature that is encrypted air quotes maybe just give me a rundown because i know something like gmail any if someone is using gmail google can actually read your email right it's the same sort of thing we talked about with gemini and chatgpt exactly the same exactly the same exactly the same now let's talk about chat so discord telegram whatsapp signal the new x chat feature what can the company see what's subpoenable what's private what's not in the status quo and then also proton chat.
- [53:55]
A
Anytime well i'll give you the rundown of all i want to talk about so discord no encryption everything visible everything discoverable subpoena bowl is fully open telegram okay i might get in trouble for saying this actually i won't get in trouble for saying this i'm not afraid of babel advertised as encrypted but not encrypted not by default right so ninety nine percent telegram is simply not encrypted right it's and defaults matter is unencrypted.
- [54:23]
B
You have to go do a separate setting and create new specific chat rooms with encryption on and i've never been involved in one of these chat rooms because of the hundreds of telegram chat rooms i'm in it's all the default which is not encrypted yeah and that's.
- [54:40]
A
Why there's some people who say there's telegram like an intelligent ops of the russian secret services or something because because it looks like a honey pot right now look i'm not going to speculate but i would say a lot of people use it believing that there's encryption but in actuality there isn't so let's call a spade a spade right signal actually very well encrypted encrypted everywhere but encrypted to an extent that there's probably some significant usability trade offs interesting it's maybe not the best for group collaboration group chat histories don't really appear as you expect right because of i mean there's valid encryption reasons for that and whatsapp actually also encrypted in many ways the communities are not but at least the you know dm's are and small group chats are encrypted but owned by meta which is probably going to do everything they can with your metadata to try to you know mess with you and make data make money off of you somehow right so unfortunately that's kind of not so great there is actually gap in the marketplace because all these solutions are sort of imperfect in some way i don't think it's possible to build a perfect solution either because you know there's always compromises but i do think you know when it comes to like telegram discord i assume that's probably where you spend a lot of your time right yeah i think there's a gap there and i think someone can do a better job will it be proton that does a better job well we got a lot of things spinning already right now and users would probably kill us if we went off and did even more things before we improved some other stuff so i would say not immediately but yeah we work for the customer we're for the user if users tell us and you're a user as well you tell us proton should do it enough people say it well guess what if you work for the customer you're obliged to listen to the customer and that's how we decide who we build if people enough people say they want it then actually we do.
- [56:36]
B
It let's talk about some other pieces of the digital stack maybe where you're you don't have product ambitions but i'm honestly i'm just looking for advice here because i don't know what i don't know so let's talk about browsing and search so there's search engine and then there's also the browser that i use so something like chrome versus maybe a firefox versus maybe a brave it was interesting andy so gemini actually added a feature inside of chrome such that when you turn it on gemini can look at all of your browsers all of your open browsers and actually allow you to ask questions based on what you're reading this is like a power user type feature right so how brilliant would it be if i could be on a webpage and i have a question in gemini about something i'm reading or some graph that i don't quite understand i say hey gemini what's this mean tell me about it give me the history of it it's interactive like that the trade off though is again gemini would be able to incorporate every single tab that i see and everything i'm looking at and incorporate that into its model of me in the world anyway browsers are certain what do you recommend here what's good what's not yes well.
- [57:49]
A
What you see now is all the ai company is building browsers yes and that's not an accident they didn't just do it for fun they did it because they realized if they integrate into your browsing and they can combine your chat history with all your browsing activity it's exponentially increasing the data that they have so just like chrome is going to integrate gemini chatgpt also wants you to be on a chatgpt browser because it's just a more effective way to suck up your data and so i do think the choice of browser is very important and again here we kind of live in a sort of imperfect world chrome is well if we're being honest here again and this is not because i don't dislike the other browser options out there but chrome is the most performant browser it's the most stable one it works for the most websites now that's true also because they're sort of anti competitive right they also do things to make certain sites not work as well as firefox to really cripple firefox so yeah they didn't play fair with firefox i would say and mozilla being fully funded by google had probably limited recourse against that but in terms of overall reliability stability performance from is unfortunately number one that's just the way it is firefox has some performance issues but honestly they close the gap it's quite good now the interesting thing about firefox of course is they've been involved in some controversy recently because they have started to get into advertising starting to get into ai they removed some of their promises that they had made to customers to sort of shift towards a more commercial model and that's raised some concerns in the community brave is i think a good option but brave always sort of had their basic attention token and their crypto sort of add on which i suppose the crypto community likes but other people who don't want to be involved in that maybe don't like that so i'm going to give you sort of like an outside choice here which doesn't come very often it's been around for a long time i'm currently liking vivaldi that's a choice okay why it's chromium based okay it isn't doing some of the crypto stuff that brave is doing that some people maybe are not the biggest fan of and it's open source and it actually works pretty good but the space is constantly evolving right so you know if you ask me this question a year from now maybe my answer is different but this is the one that i have that i think is actually a solid option among browsers we talk about our phones.
- [60:27]
B
So one of the reason i feel like i like my iphone is because apple places a priority on privacy but i think you're going to tell me some of that is smoke and mirrors and propaganda and maybe not as true as i hope it is but when it comes to a choice of a phone stack what are the pros and cons what should privacy conscious consumers and digital natives be wary of here yeah.
- [60:58]
A
Well the first thing i might say is if somebody is spending billions of dollars putting up giant billboards you know saying privacy you probably should be a little bit suspicious why they need to spend so much money to convince you that it's private if it actually it's actually private right actually you know apple has the same definition of privacy as probably openai where you know it's kind of funny every single company has its own definition of privacy and what they're really trying to do is redefine privacy and i can give you some example you know google if you go to their webpage or to any of the product pages privacy encryption security it's all over the place right and i call it privacy washing but what is google's actual definition of privacy the definition is we're going to give you more options over how we abuse your data privacy for them is about all the different settings that they have this is a goal definition that is so cynical but i think it's true right right and then apple's definition is we're going to be the only ones who are allowed to abuse your data no one else is allowed just us right so third party cookies all this other stuff no just us and apple has a giant ad business they do do lots of advertising and they're putting it into their products it's a thirty billion business today you know the apple advertising business and they do a bunch of things that are just counterintuitive to prices i'll give you a quick example app store fees if you charge people that take subscriptions on mobile a thirty percent kind of revenue what you're basically doing is you're incentivizing a surveillance capitalism business model because a free app like facebook pays zero actually they pay dollar ninety nine per year which is for the developer fee but that's it so if you charge proton thirty percent and you charge facebook ninety nine a year you clearly don't care about privacy because you are essentially making that privacy business model a lot harder to sustain and so apple has a bunch of things that is clearly contradictory to their privacy advertising so at the end they don't care about privacy as all the ads say they care about money and then this is very clear when you sort of look into that unfortunately today mobile it's a monopoly of two players every single mobile phone is either android or it's you know ios and i think this is one of the hardest monopolies to break because it cannot be broken with less than i would say probably you know anywhere from five to ten billion dollars why because the device manufacturers themselves are also complicit in maintaining the monopoly now these device manufacturers are paid by these big tech companies to pre install certain applications certain softwares as a condition for getting access to you know android for example and this is the whole thing behind the epic lawsuit against google right with sort of these deals that were being made and so i feel the only way that we resolve this actually is regulation i'm not let's say a very pro government person in general but in a monopoly situation you've got to have regulators come in and say this is a monopoly and here are certain things that you cannot do because you are a monopoly it's the only way because it's gone too far now there's only two left in the whole mobile space there used to be blackberry there used to be nokia there used to be other options but now there's literally just.
- [64:27]
B
Two i guess andy tell me what areas that apple is really breaching privacy on so if my data let's say in icloud they say it's encrypted is that all fully encrypted or let's say you know can apple does apple have any access to data on my phone and how well does you know like face id basically like can third parties really like sort of crack the encryption that's on my iphone i mean there was there's some case back in the day i think it was like was it the fbi i think i think apple made like much propaganda about this like fbi couldn't crack our cones phones held firm.
- [65:14]
A
You know how that story ended no that story ended because the fbi dropped the case because they found a way to crack it without apple's.
- [65:23]
B
Corporation right with their own three letter.
- [65:26]
A
Agency stuff basically said at the end never mind it's okay you could have the court win we found a way in so don't worry about it great and that's look i think among the big tech companies apple definitely is the best from a privacy standpoint they do have a different business model of selling hardware which allows them to do that but apple is a company that cares first and foremost about profit other principles kind of fall by the wayside after profit and if you look at what they've done from a competition standpoint they were referred for criminal prosecution by a court in california for how blatantly they breached a court ruling that asked them to play fair with epic and other developers it's clear that this is a company that only cares about money and every single time a court asks them to try to open up their ecosystem to allow other privacy players like proton to be able to have a chance to succeed they essentially engage in malicious compliance if you go to a wikipedia article on malicious compliance some of the examples are apple right and so it's a company that i think yes is more private than google but it doesn't really have a moral compass to many sense it doesn't behave in a very ethical way and you see this in sort of the way they act in every single case right the european union said look you need to stop being abusive towards developers and you need to open up your app store ecosystem and give you a quick example if you're in certain countries you can't get proton you can't get proton because the app store is the only way to get proton and apple has decided to comply with a dictator in some country in moving certain apps because that is more profitable for them than trying to fight it or pulling it out of the market right so there's all these different examples where i just think apple has strayed very far from what it originally stood for it's sort of been let's say it's almost like a contaminated or infected by this sort of relentless pursuit of money and only money above all else it's lost some of the fundamental values so i do think it's more private than google but i find it very hard to put my trust in a company that is engaged in all sorts of behavior that if you look from the outside is really quite despicable.
- [67:52]
C
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- [69:47]
B
Is where do we put our trust i will tell you the the crypto consensus on this is you got to trust the cryptography and that's the only thing you can trust basically and maybe this brings in the conversation of governments right so we've been talking about a big surveillance capitalism and some of the corporations and there are ways where our governments are a check on that power and they're democratic institutions at least you know the democratic republics that we have are and that so they should represent the people and they should be there to support civil liberties but we don't always find that that's the case with respect to privacy and encryption and maybe i'm much more familiar with some of the battles that are going on in the united states and we've had battles with cryptocurrency and you know financial surveillance and all of these things and we could talk about that but there are a couple of that have popped on my radar that i want to find out from you a bit more about maybe you would know which ones we should focus on but the eu chat control legislation keeps popping up and i think andy maybe you could describe this but does this not give eu countries the ability basically to pre check communication inside of a chat and just make sure it's not child pornography or any illicit behavior insert whatever the government thinks is illicit illegal here and essentially doesn't it break cryptography can you talk about that legislation and anything other that you're seeing coming from world governments that's pretty.
- [71:15]
A
Alarming yeah but actually before i jump on that i want to go back to the point you made about fuss about who we trust and the crypto point of we should trust in the crypto actually sorry to break it to you right but crypto is written by people and people manage these crypto systems and the infrastructure in which a crypto runs so i don't think you can say just trust in the crypto at some point you also need that trust in the people as well and so people is a bit important you can do the crypto correct but if it's a person who is sort of to kind of go back to the crypto scam examples or icos those were open source projects crypto was probably correct in many cases but the people were scammers and unfortunately you know crypto was crap but the guy that ran it was a scammer what do you want to do right so as much as we try to remove people out of it there's ultimately element of you're trusting a person you're trusting a team and when i look at the services i trust i also looked very closely at who runs it who do they stand for what are they said and what might their values be and by the way the first kind of red flag is if you can't even find out who they are right because if they're not very visible that's like okay why are they not discoverable what are they trying to hide from right interesting interesting yeah so i think people is very important now going to eu travel control is not a new concept it's been if the file has been open and debated and kicked back and forth at the european commission probably for now close to three years and what they want to do is they want to say okay so i'll tell you what the pitch is and i'll tell you why the pitch is bullshit right the pitch is basically we need to be able to prevent you know child pornography and terrorism and the best way to do that is every single message on an encrypted app before it is sent it's going to be scanned and sent to a government database where it can be compared against you know known bad things and then if it's a bad then your phone needs to phone home to the government and report you to the police and the police will look at your.
- [73:30]
B
Stuff and oh my god yeah that's what it is and by the way would this include email it's obviously chat.
- [73:37]
A
Conversation by the way so chat control would force you to do that what is kind of again i may sound anti apple right but yeah which i'm honestly not so anti apple because i try to be pretty objective here in general and i would say they're better than google but chat control is basically doing what apple volunteered to do a couple years ago i remember this right and then they got a massive backlash for doing it but actually in some sense this is almost an apple invention apple was the one that kind of said hey you know we're happy to do this voluntarily we will voluntarily scan your shit and then call the police.
- [74:10]
B
On you to protect the kids of.
- [74:12]
A
Course that's just the reason and i thought that was a giant breach of privacy i don't know why apple proposed it but actually apple made this proposal voluntarily already several years ago and then they pulled back from it but that's what chat control in effect is doing now fortunately chat control keeps popping up and then getting killed so it's a zombie it keeps coming back alive but but it's not being very successful and what happened recently was the danish presidency of the european commission tried again to introduce it and push it forward and predictably it ran into opposition because it's deeply unpopular across europe and in fact someone even set up an email campaign to bombard people in the european commission over this which is super effective but in the end the danish presidency removed the mandatory detection orders from the current text so presently it's actually not possible for the mandatory scanning to be enforced on tech companies but it is possible for tech companies to do it voluntarily so apple's a crazy scheme if they want to bring it back would definitely be possible and they could do that under the new legislation but the mandatory part has been removed and that doesn't mean it won't come back these things have a way of coming back every couple years but i consider knocking wood here the chat control issue to actually be almost resolved in europe and we're not going to have mandatory breaking of end to end encryption communications for this purpose and that i think is a huge win for europe it's something that is yeah it's we were hoping this would be the outcome and it seemed like we finally gotten there so i think it shows that human rights still survives today in europe how do we.
- [76:02]
B
Harden this a bit more because as you point out it does seem like these types of issues is a zombie that comes back from the dead and keeps haunting us or we're always playing whack a mole and if it's not in one jurisdiction it's in another if it's not one bill it's another if it's not one take on you know cracking encryption breaching privacy it's another is there some way to like enshrine these civil digital liberties in some sort of a like a bill of rights you know the us has kind of the bill of rights and these are things that are baked into the constitution they don't really address privacy i mean that's something you have to like read into it and furthermore they don't really they're not as adapted to the digital world like for example if i was to think about a modern day digital bill of rights the number one thing would be you can't outlaw encryption every single citizen should always have the ability to encrypt their data and the government shall have no ability to like breach that interfere with that make it illegal is that kind of what we need in order to like have the zombies stay dead and is anybody working on that.
- [77:09]
A
Project well if you look closely at the log this is enshrined in certain laws like there are people that say encryption is speech and if that's the case then the first amendment does protect you and if you look at european law like a mass surveillance mass surveillance is illegal in europe because the european court of human rights has interpreted some of the eu statutes as saying that so there is sort of a legal basis for a lot of this but i do think it has to be strengthened because even there's a legal basis you can always find creative ways to go around it and for data retentions the argument is always oh we're just going to do it in certain situations when there's a state of emergency whatever whatever right but then you have countries like france which are like perpetually in a state of emergency we're like oh we've been emergency for ten years right and so like that's bullshit right so i do think we need to have new legislation that protects entrances but legislation is done by legislators and most of the people today in government actually are tech illiterate they don't know anything about tech so i hate to say it but i think the solution is that some people need to die and let me quantify the statement right not kill them as in they need to die.
- [78:36]
B
From old age progress moves one funeral at a time that's sort of an.
- [78:40]
A
Idea exactly of natural causes of course yes right yes and then new people need to come in from the more tech savvy generation who understands things better understand these years better and can put in place a population for example if i were to go today to the european parliament or even the swiss parliament and ask them to write a new legislation for privacy encryption and security i probably wouldn't do it i wouldn't do it because i would be more worried about them yeah about them screwing it up so i was like you know maybe you just don't do it at all because you could actually make it worse you know and the saying is they will kill us with their good intentions right so yeah i think it needs time we need to have a new generation of legislators who understand better who are more tech native and who you can have this conversation with but.
- [79:34]
B
Andy it's not just being tech native that is an essential and important component but you also have to have these kind of classical liberal values of enshrining ideals like privacy as an individual right because somebody might push back and say andy no privacy is great this is fantastic all we're asking for is for governments to have a special key that they can use with court approval to unlock the data and you don't support you know child abusers or terrorism do you andy can you talk about that type of objection because that's a common objection even people who quote unquote understand the tech might make yeah and the.
- [80:16]
A
Answer i would give is i've never seen a backdoor that only lets the good guys in because it doesn't exist i wish it did but the reality is it doesn't and then the question i would ask is which government because are you talking about the government that is in power in your country today or the one that could be in power five ten years from now the point of civil liberties fundamental human rights the reason they're called fundamental is because they're also here to protect us from the tyranny of the government and the government even in a democratic society it's often just one election from changing and i say here in europe but in the us what i saw was after the last election half the country became terrified of the civil liberties being infringed but the election before that the other half was terrified that they were going to be infringed and that's a perfect example you need to have these things in place so that no matter how the election goes you are not terrified because your fundamental rights are going to be protected so you're not doing it to protect maybe present but you're doing to protect against all possible futures and that's a forward looking notion of why fundamental rights are required and why even if you don't feel an imminent threat from your government today you should still fight for this right and by the way this is also not saying that we are going to allow criminality to run rampant on the internet with no checks or balances whatsoever that's not what we're saying either we're saying it has to be proportional and the reason people object to mass surveillance and the reason people object to chat control is that is essentially saying everybody is under surveillance by default even if they're not under criminal suspicion and that is undermining the fundamental presumption of innocence which is a cornerstone of democracy because we as a society say that you're innocent until proven guilty if you're guilty until proven innocent then actually that's fascism that's not democracy anymore and that's a value that we need to defend it's fundamental to democracy without this you don't have a democratic society that survives in the twenty first century and this is the argument that that i always give people who bring this up because yes i hear this often but it's simply not true when you think about it well here's another.
- [82:39]
B
Related objection that they might make and we certainly hear it in crypto with peer to peer transactions is bad guys use this stuff to do bad things and i'm sure that there are bad guys who have used proton to disguise their privacy in fact i mean maybe that's the only place they can get it or one of the few places that they can get it and so they might say andy well just like cryptocurrency what you're doing with privacy is you you might have good intentions but you are empowering criminals and terrorists and child abusers and all of these things and you're equipping them with privacy technologies over at gmail you know they use those tools government subpoena can go access their emails and and they don't have that ability so what you're doing is kind of a net bad what do.
- [83:24]
A
You say to that yeah well the funny thing is this is something that can be proven with data if you look at the number of law enforcement requests that proton gets and you look at the ratio of that compared to the number of users it's not worse than google in fact this is very surprising but the data is clearly there it's public and it's there so the notion that criminals are more strongly preferring platforms like proton is kind of a false one and also the reason for this is kind of simple let's say you're using you know proton to send a bomb threat well actually you don't care that your message is encrypted in fact you want the other side to read it so so so so so i so so simply so that but.
- [84:08]
B
I might do this andy to seal man this a bit more i might do this on a proton vpn so that authorities couldn't track my traffic and i might do this using other privacy tools that allow me to do this kind of nefarious thing yeah yeah and.
- [84:22]
A
Yeah so i agree but first point is the stats don't show it's the case right okay but let's assume the stats were to show the opposite yeah let's assume that and actually there were more criminal users on crypto platforms well i'll give you another stat i'm willing to bet that the rate of cyber criminality in a fully surveilled society is lower in certain countries pretty sure the rate of criminality is going to be lower in china and in north korea compared to us and europe but you definitely pay a very high price for that and if you were to ask the people in north korea do they feel more secure because of the total surveillance that their society provides to them well they would tell you in public yes but then in private when you can ask them and you actually give them extra privacy to express their true feeling they would probably say no and this is the core concept in a democratic society in a society that gives privacy to its citizens there is always a negative externality there is a cost to that but it's a cost that we should be willing to bear because the cost of the alternative a society without privacy is actually so much higher and that is all there is to it right we can never get to a world where we can prevent all crimes that occur online but we don't want to get to that world because that's actually a much worse world than the one that we live in today.
- [86:00]
B
Well said and i think our politicians also need to understand that aspect of it in addition to understanding the technology to pass some good privacy legislation and regulation andy we've been talking mostly about the proton stack of tools which is around what i would call communication types of protocols and so it's you know it's email or it's a chat back and forth with an ai that sort of thing in the crypto world of things and i mean cryptocurrency here not general cryptography in the in the crypto world of things we think a lot about financial privacy and this is i would argue a subset of communication right you're communicating economic value basically but i'm wondering if you would go that far because there are some people in the privacy space in some jurisdictions that treat financial privacy as different from communication privacy so for example they might respect citizens rights to communication privacy but when it gets to financial privacy territory we can't have that you must have aml kyc we're not necessarily comfortable with the whole peer to peer type thing we need to know who the person sending the money is and who the receiver is at all time we need the ability to blacklist whitelist and pull the plug in the crypto project we say no i mean financial transactions should be peer to peer and by the way they can be and should be private some jurisdictions also don't like that aspect of it we've had many court cases around that what's your take on this on financial privacy specifically it's a matter of.
- [87:34]
A
Perspective today we see a lot in the news about venezuela and one of the countries with the highest bitcoin adoption in the world in fact is venezuela and there's three reasons for that one massive inflation running out of control the government suppressing all dissent also through controlling financial institutions and just privacy you need to have you know you need to be able to move money in and out of the country without being detected because otherwise the government may well they may tax it they may steal it they may you know use it to target you a bunch of things could happen there is really no difference between freedom and financial freedom if you don't have financial freedom i would argue you don't have actual freedom either and so i see it as kind of a similar concept and you need both so my view actually is we must have financial freedom this is something that we should fight for and it wasn't so long ago that we had this we had cash for many years and cash well maybe this is not popular in crypto crowd but i think cash is one of the best privacy technologies out.
- [88:44]
B
There it's actually extremely popular in the crypto crowd and we would one hundred.
- [88:47]
A
Percent agree yes yes so banning crypto is a bit like saying i'm going to ban cash and that's the analogy that we give you would never ban cash it would be unacceptable so i think that's an argument that we should advance in this space and we should advance it because it's the correct argument.
- [89:06]
B
Actually agree with that argument and i'm curious your take on this so you're definitely a privacy advocate many shared values with many people in crypto in general what's your take on crypto right now i imagine that you probably like me and many listeners see some of the benefits here also have seen some of the scams and the downsides here as well but what's your take on it as you look at crypto like right.
- [89:33]
A
Now i think the biggest challenge in this space and in our space and we're also in this space as well in fact is the ratio between the legitimate and the illegitimate scammy is incorrect and at proton what we also guard very carefully about is that ratio we know there will always be illicit uses of our platform but we need to keep that ratio to be as low as possible and in our case we're talking a small fraction of a percent because above that you actually get tainted in a way that is not conducive for the future success of the movement and in crypto today when you talk about illegitimate uses scams et cetera it's not a fraction of one percent it's unfortunately probably i don't know thirty forty percent it's a substantial and i think crypto is always going to have a limit to its influence its growth its scalability and how mainstream it can be if we as a community do not tackle that problem i don't have the answer actually for how is the best way to address that i think that requires probably someone smarter than me that has thought longer about this problem but i think we need to do that if we don't do that we don't move it into the mainstream and we need to do it in a way that preserves our values as well how.
- [91:01]
B
Do you do it at proton so is it a matter of kind of attracting the good guys more good guys because then the good guys outweigh the bad guys if you're able to bring.
- [91:10]
A
Them to the platform it's attracting the good guys but it's also making it crystal clear that we are not here to serve the bad guys and so it's as much positioning as it is you know technology and of course you do everything you can to try to block abuse you try to you know find the suspicious user patterns things that.
- [91:33]
B
Don'T look without breaking your principles yes.
- [91:36]
A
Without breaking preption you do what you can and also reacting quickly when i'm made aware of users who are using it for illicit purposes there's no tolerance they're gone i don't care if they're paying me or not paying me that's a breach of terms of service it's a breach of law they're banned from the platform that's it and i do think if you look at crypto there are too many platforms that probably became aware of illicit activities that were happening on their platform but these activities were profitable for them so they probably tolerated the activities for far too long and that made it sort of an environment that welcomed other illicit actors because they felt safe within the space so it's about actually creating an environment that is hostile to actors who are not going to be good for the long term reputation and long term brand of crypto space as a whole we need to maybe we need to call out scammers for being scammers instead of fetting them at crypto conferences maybe they should be blacklisted and not allowed to occupy our public spaces and the public imagination i always say some of the most famous figures in cryptos all have convictions that is not a good thing right some of them say it's a badge of honor that we fought the system but no you're just criminals and that's not positive overall if you want crypto to.
- [93:07]
B
Become mainstream are you planning to do more andy with your crypto wallet in particular i believe it's a bitcoin wallet now there's obviously you could expand that to say ethereum you could get into decentralized finance one of the interesting things about bitcoin is there's no privacy on bitcoin so there is pseudo anonymity of course but if you send from one bitcoin address to another it's all on chain there are various organizations that can kind of like data mine that and figure out who the underlying wallet identity is so it's not truly private it is peer to peer but in general when you think about kind of crypto products at proton what's the idea here.
- [93:46]
A
We also believe very strongly in focus within the company and i would want to be let's say the world's best bitcoin wallet before i go off and add other things and the other things that we add also would depend on what is the demand from the community what are people looking for what are the key things bitcoin today actually is the most commonly used coin within our user community so it makes sense to support that everything else actually is a really really far distant second or third so we think about our mission of best serving our community the best thing to do right now is actually to take bitcoin and make it as good as possible within our wallet because that is what the vast majority of people today on proton are actively using and this could change with time blockchains they come and go so there's no saying that something new could come out in a few years become very big because it has better qualities than bitcoin and then maybe a big proportion of our community starts to use this new thing at which point we would also be obliged to adopt it because we're here to serve the community ultimately so that's kind of how i look at it i look at what is the work that brings the biggest benefit and biggest value to our user community and what are they asking for and it's a very simple community driven decision making so.
- [95:08]
B
Andy let's get practical now as we maybe bring this to a close so somebody listening to all of this so far is just like i agree with the principal i'm busy like perfect privacy in today's day and age it's impossible it's incredibly difficult very time consuming too much mental overhead why bother what do you say to that is there is there anything like any advice you'd give to a just a normal person for like three to five things maybe they can do to improve their their privacy posture right now that aren't overly burdensome.
- [95:41]
A
Well people are lazy so i think three to five is way too much right maybe we leave them with one and the one that i would give is actually a lot of people have asked me proton always had a vision to do many things build ecosystem why did you start with email intuitively it makes no sense because email is sort of a dying medium of communication that's well the demise of email has been predicted continuously for thirty years is still.
- [96:07]
B
Around i'm still an email maxi myself but i get that people aren't yes.
- [96:12]
A
And you know what email will still be here in fact i predict thirty years from now because email is not a means of communication email is actually identity it is your digital identity which i would argue in the twenty first century is the only identity that matters and when you switch from gmail to protonmail what are you actually doing you're not finding a new method to communicate because nobody communicates on email anymore right even i don't communicate so much on email but making that switch is incredibly powerful because gmail isn't email right gmail is identity it's a logged in state into your account it is a thing that allows google to consolidate your data from across the entire web all the sites you visit that run google analytics all the cookies that are dropped across the web all the files you upload all the communication you have everything you do on google every video that you watch on youtube it's all linked to your google account and you know how you can prevent google from having that information just log out so switching from gmail to protonmail is simply saying i'm going to erase my identity from google i can still go on youtube and watch videos and you know whatever right but it is no longer having all the information on the internet tied to a single profile of who i am and you have effectively opted out of the google system by moving your identity to a different provider who you trust more and thanks to gdpr this is pretty easy now this is easy switch functionality google is required to let you export so you could go to a proton account you can link your gmail account move all your data over and it's just a few clicks so i.
- [97:56]
B
Think and google will truly delete your.
- [97:58]
A
Data well google will let you transfer everything and they're also obliged under european law to delete your data as well.
- [98:04]
B
How about a us law would that be for us listeners as well i.
- [98:08]
A
Think on the us it is maybe not obliged in the same way but there's many state laws but there's many state laws which do require it okay so google does do it as well in the us because they because they kind of have to so moving your moving from gmail to pro temo is sort of opting out of the google ecosystem it's logging out of google it's preventing them having a profile it doesn't mean you can't use any google services but if you're not logged in it's completely different the amount of vision they have on you is different and it's easy now it's a couple of clicks and then you're done so that's actually how you start then of course there's all these other things you can do right but that's the main one i think the main one is to protect your identity and separate your identity from big tech ecosystem yeah it's a you can still have actually like i still have for example an old yahoo account right you know when i'm at mcdonald's and they asked me to you know use the free wifi i'm not giving them my proton i'm going to give them that yahoo to collect the spam right but there's things like this i think that that's one thing that you do that probably makes a big immediate impact and that's how we started with email in twenty fourteen which everybody said was already dead back then but it's not because it's your idea i think.
- [99:11]
B
You are absolutely right i think that is golden advice for all bankless listeners actually so i've done this i haven't full ported my google like over but what's fantastic about proton is you can also create different aliases for different so if you go to mcdonald's wifi you could just spin up a different alias in proton and use a fake alias so it's not tied to kind of your main alias and you have like numbers of of things that you could spin up also when i was setting up in proton just the emphasis on on security was really important i mean we have a lot of email accounts that that get hacked in crypto so that people can go get your identity go get access to your exchange go get your recovery password right they don't know your proton email then they can't get that and also if you are two factor authenticating with like passkeys and yubikeys and completely locking your email down and proton kind of makes that easy to do you do it that way too so locking down your identity is pretty key i think that's great advice.
- [100:08]
A
Andy and there's something that we have called proton sentinel which is pretty unique to proton but we do it because we have a lot of activists journalists crypto high profile people who use proton and it's a way that even if your yubikey is stolen or your two fa is stolen and your password is stolen if you enable this feature we will still sort of detect logins that we find suspicious and block them so it practically secures your account even in the case that you have been fully compromised and that's something that actually we added in because we got demand from crypto users on proton that said hey this is happening a lot in our space we need more security so we actually built that it's called proton sentinel and you can read up on it it's kind of interesting as well that's.
- [100:46]
B
Fantastic yeah i love the stack and thank you so much for your time today and it's been great i mean i guess as you close one last question it does seem like i mean you've been doing this for ten years right and the internet has come a long way since then now we have ai and everything that that will bring so paint a future of twenty thirty maybe one where privacy wins and we're doing okay or another maybe a darker future where we'll kind of lose this fight and it continues on the trajectory that that it's been on and like what do the two different worlds look.
- [101:17]
A
Like yeah well i think losing the fight would be if big tech companies decided to engage in anti competitive practices which regulators don't block and they do that to wipe out companies like proton other privacy companies to give you kind of the very basic example they could say we're not going to allow privacy companies on the app stores and then if they did that because they're not declared as monopolies right now there's nothing that prevents them from doing that and then companies like proton will not be able to exist in such an outcome so i think that is the risk is that big tech is so emboldened by the lack of regulation and lack of government oversight that they just go off and do completely blatantly unfair things to kill off the space i suppose.
- [102:02]
B
They could even buy the regulators at that point i mean they could get involved in they're really doing that if.
- [102:07]
A
You look at yeah if you look at the us i think they've already bought a couple of regulators and a couple you know maybe even a couple people high up in government right so definitely a few senators let's say so this is what the future looks like so this is the future where government is subservient to big tech and big tech controls our government and our democracy and democracy effectively ceases to exist because governments don't work for people anymore but governments work for big tech companies and we are to be frank pretty dangerously close to that at least in certain countries so that's the dystopian view the alternative is companies like proton and not just us but the entire space of privacy protecting services the entire crypto and bitcoin space that is working on financial freedom is that this space survives it continues to develop and grow it provides a viable alternative because again it's not enough to exist you need to be an alternative that is viable you need to have a feature set that someone can credibly switch over and not be so burdened by the lack of features and the poor user experience that they cannot stay on your platform so it means that we create a user experience that is good enough across our entire ecosystem not just proton but also all the crypto and bitcoin ecosystem that is a viable replacement for traditional finance and traditional big tech companies and we win the argument in the public mind in the public space where people understand that this is a better future and we at that point would probably achieve a session as a market share so crypto could go from maybe less than a percent to perhaps twenty thirty percent of finance overall maybe proton instead of having one or two percent of the market twenty or thirty percent and at that point that is scale that is a viable fraction of the world population where you have enough of a base where actually you can win in the long term we get to that scale getting past the fifty percent tipping point that is conceivable so these are sort of the two paths and the path that we end up going on really depends on us as individuals because we live in capitalism and even china that claims to be communism is today capitalism and the most powerful force in capitalism is you is the individual consumer making the right choices steering the economic and also technical and political future of our societies through the choices that we make every single day in our daily consumption of services and if we make the right choices now in the next five years then we take the role on a different path and so so i suppose the positive note that we can end on is yes it seems depressing it seems scary it seems very difficult but actually we have the power and we can do this if we want to.
- [105:01]
B
I love that perfect way to end andy thank you so much for joining.
- [105:04]
A
Us today yeah thanks for having me it's really been a pleasure and hope to be back sometime to share some.
- [105:09]
B
More thoughts absolutely guys got to let you know of course none of this has been financial advice although with some fantastic privacy advice we are headed west this is the frontier it's not for everyone but we're glad you're with us on the bankless journey thanks a lot.