Andy Yen

Andy Yen

Big Tech knows more about us than we do.
Andy Yen goes further: according to him, they probably hold more data on you than some governments.

Most of us have been using Gmail for years without ever feeling in danger.
Honestly, who would want to read our emails?

It is this almost blind trust that Andy is trying to raise the alarm about.

For him, protecting your privacy isn’t about hiding something. It’s about anticipating the day the definition of what’s illegal changes.
We often think the threat comes from governments. For Andy, it mostly comes from the business model of the web.

By default, everything is shared: our emails, our documents, our entire online life.
Your inbox has become a digital passport that lets you be tracked everywhere and reveals far more about you than your search history.

Faced with this, Andy decided to build an alternative.

A physicist who spent time at CERN, he founded Proton in Geneva in 2014, a European alternative to Google.
They offer the same services: email, calendar, storage, documents – but with the opposite model.

Google makes money by exploiting your data to sell you advertising.
Proton is funded by its users’ subscriptions, not by their data: emails and files are encrypted so that no one, not even its own teams, can read them.

Today, more than 100 million people use its services.
The company is profitable, self-funded and controlled by a foundation.

In this episode, Andy shares his fears for Europe, which he has defended heart and soul for years, but which has neither American funding nor the Chinese work culture, and which, according to him, isn’t moving fast enough.

In this episode, we cover:

• Why you should feel concerned even when you “have nothing to hide”
• Why breaking away from Google is easier than you think
• Why hosting your data on a European server isn’t enough
• Why the European plan to scan private messages is a danger

An episode to listen to in order to understand why your data is worth more than you think, then send to someone who still uses Gmail for everything.

You can reach Andy on LinkedIn and X.

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