‘No company is going to go to jail for you’: Proton’s CTO on balancing privacy, policy, and trust

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. And trust in the software world isn’t only about the people who run the companies, but also the technology they develop and sell and the corporate structure in place to make sure that technology is built against the right incentives. Pure Decoder bait, in other words. The challenge is that Bart also says part of Proton’s mission is very much to succeed at being a viable competitor to Big Tech, and that means the company has to grow and expand to competitive scale, all while preserving its core values. This philosophy, and that challenge, is baked directly into Proton’s structure and even its physical location — the company and its servers are based in Switzerland, in part because of the Swiss government’s geopolitical neutrality. Two years ago, Proton also transitioned to a nonprofit structure governed by a foundation, which is a familiar model used by all kinds of companies that ostensibly operate in the public interest, but which has failure modes of its own, as we just saw with OpenAI . Verge subscribers, don’t forget you get exclusive access to ad-free Decoder wherever you get your podcasts. Head here . Not a subscriber? You can sign up here . We talked about all of that, but I really wanted to talk to Bart because he’s responsible for the technical construction of some very complex systems that interact with all these complex politics.