Decoder with Nilay Patel · Thursday, July 16, 2026
Bart Butler, CTO of Proton, detailed the company's privacy-preserving approach, emphasizing that their products are architected with encryption at the core, making user data inaccessible to the company itself. He also highlighted their business model, which relies on user subscriptions rather than advertising, aligning the company's financial interests with user privacy.
“The first is that we encrypt all the data that we can, right? So if we wanted to turn around and sell that data to somebody, we can't. It's mathematically impossible for us to do it, right?”
“So we've tied the value of the business and the growth to the business to protecting our users, so that our interests are aligned.”