Submitted via IRC for TheMightyBuzzard
ProtonMail suggests fear of the Donald prompting lockdown
"ProtonMail follows the Swiss policy of neutrality. We do not take any position for or against Trump," the Swiss company's CEO stated on Monday, before revealing that new user sign-ups immediately doubled following Trump's election victory.
ProtonMail has published figures showing that as soon as the election results rolled in, the public began to seek out privacy-focused services such as its own.
CEO Andy Yen said that, in communicating with these new users, the company found people apprehensive about the decisions that President Trump might take and what they would mean considering the surveillance activities of the National Security Agency.
"Given Trump's campaign rhetoric against journalists, political enemies, immigrants, and Muslims, there is concern that Trump could use the new tools at his disposal to target certain groups," Yen said. "As the NSA currently operates completely out of the public eye with very little legal oversight, all of this could be done in secret."
ProtonMail was launched back in May 2014 by scientists who had met at CERN and MIT. In response to the Snowden revelations regarding collusion between the NSA and other email providers such as Google, they created a government-resistant, end-to-end encrypted email service.
Source: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/11/14/protonmail_subs_double_after_trump_victory/
(Score: 2) by jmorris on Tuesday November 15 2016, @06:12AM
Not possible. No way enough people pay for it and since they promise privacy they can't use the users as product to sell to advertisers like gmail.com, yahoo.com, etc. do. So if very many people sign up for these guys they collapse into insolvency because they won't have the cash to go up to Internet scale. Enough people use my idea of a client that encrypts by default and it would be interesting to see if gmail stays free.
(Score: 2) by Capt. Obvious on Tuesday November 15 2016, @07:29AM
That does seem to be the problem. The insurmountable problem.
There is also, "ow do you fund development without a revenue stream to profit from?" I suppose an open-source project could work. But then you have to be worried about various government backdoors from donors.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 15 2016, @07:40AM
As if we don't have problems with backdoors in proprietary software. With Free Software, at least we have the freedom to look at the code, and someone might spot any backdoors; no such luck with non-free software. Free Software is often better from a privacy and security standpoint.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Tuesday November 15 2016, @01:25PM
We seem to get by okay here but I doubt that would scale to millions of users.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.