I have been talking about this huge opportunity for Switzerland ever since the ‘summer of Snowden', and finally we are seeing some action on this. ProtonMail sounds very promising and I just funded their crowd-funding campaign and signed up for the beta-service. Read the TechCrunch piece. Read what I said about Swiss Data opportunities (in German; more via this blog). Read what I wrote about Prism and Snowden a year ago.

In the wake of the Lavabit’s demise and increased interest in secure mail services, Switzerland-based ProtonMail is looking to zap a little life into the old PGP mail server market. Currently crowdfunded far past its goal of $100,000, the service wants to make it cheap and easy to get a secure email account with just enough paranoia built in to keep you safe. I asked one of the creators, co-founder Andy Yen, why we should trust them. He said we didn’t have to. “One of our goals is actually to build a system that does not require trusting us,” he said. “We’ve taken the first step with our zero access architecture which means we cannot actually read any of our users’ encrypted messages. When the code base becomes more mature, we also plan to open source the ProtonMail software.”The service works by encrypting all the messages in the user’s web browser before it even reaches the ProtonMail servers. This means ProtonMail doesn’t hold the password and can never decrypt user messages. It’s this unique proposition — that there is no way to get everyone’s email if the server is compromised — that seems to have struck a chord with backers.

from Pocket https://ift.tt/1paedtJ via TechCrunch