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posted by janrinok on Tuesday November 15 2016, @03:31AM   Printer-friendly
from the making-the-most-of-an-opportunity dept.

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/


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  • (Score: 2) by Capt. Obvious on Tuesday November 15 2016, @07:29AM

    by Capt. Obvious (6089) on Tuesday November 15 2016, @07:29AM (#426889)

    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.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 15 2016, @07:40AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 15 2016, @07:40AM (#426891)

    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

    by The Mighty Buzzard (18) Subscriber Badge <themightybuzzard@proton.me> on Tuesday November 15 2016, @01:25PM (#426939) Homepage Journal

    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.