‘No company is going to go to jail for you’: Proton’s CTO on balancing privacy, policy, and trust
Proton CTO Bart Butler discusses the company's strategy of selling trust through privacy-focused software and its transition to a non-profit foundation structure. The interview explores the difficulty of scaling a privacy-centric business to compete with Big Tech while maintaining core ethical values.
Why it matters
As data privacy becomes a central concern for users, the corporate governance models of tech companies are increasingly scrutinized for their ability to protect user interests.
Today on Decoder , we’ve got the first of a two-part series on the systems that run the world: I’m talking with Bart Butler, the CTO of Proton, the company that makes private and secure productivity software. You probably know it best for Proton Mail, which is encrypted by default, but the company also has docs, sheets, a calendar , and even a new AI assistant called Lumo, all built and marketed around the idea that they should be vastly more private than the products from Big Tech companies. You’ll hear Bart say pretty plainly that the thing Proton sells, at a high level, isn’t really the products themselves, but actually trust.
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