Notes de l’épisode
Notre nouveau film « Europe : il va falloir arrêter de subir 🇪🇺 » est dispo sur YouTube : https://taap.it/rewrosY
Retrouvez l'épisode en version française ici : https://www.gdiy.fr/podcast/andy-yen-proton-fr/
Big Tech knows more about us than we do.
Andy Yen goes further: according to him, they probably hold more data on you than some governments.
Most of us have been using Gmail for years without ever feeling in danger.
Honestly, who would want to read our emails?
It is this almost blind trust that Andy is trying to raise the alarm about.
For him, protecting your privacy isn’t about hiding something. It’s about anticipating the day the definition of what’s illegal changes.
We often think the threat comes from governments. For Andy, it mostly comes from the business model of the web.
By default, everything is shared: our emails, our documents, our entire online life.
Your inbox has become a digital passport that lets you be tracked everywhere and reveals far more about you than your search history.
Faced with this, Andy decided to build an alternative.
A physicist who spent time at CERN, he founded Proton in Geneva in 2014, a European alternative to Google.
They offer the same services: email, calendar, storage, documents - but with the opposite model.
Google makes money by exploiting your data to sell you advertising.
Proton is funded by its users’ subscriptions, not by their data: emails and files are encrypted so that no one, not even its own teams, can read them.
Today, more than 100 million people use its services.
The company is profitable, self-funded and controlled by a foundation.
In this episode, Andy shares his fears for Europe, which he has defended heart and soul for years, but which has neither American funding nor the Chinese work culture, and which, according to him, isn’t moving fast enough.
In this episode, we cover:
- Why you should feel concerned even when you “have nothing to hide”
- Why breaking away from Google is easier than you think
- Why hosting your data on a European server isn’t enough
- Why the European plan to scan private messages is a danger
An episode to listen to in order to understand why your data is worth more than you think, then send to someone who still uses Gmail for everything.
You can reach Andy on Linkedin and X.
TIMELINE:
- 00:00:00 : Why do we need to protect our data?
- 00:11:12 : Building a profitable company without Silicon Valley methods
- 00:23:47 : The method to reach 100 million users
- 00:32:34 : Europe's tech advantage over the Americans
- 00:41:03 : “Privacy is a pillar of democracy.”
- 01:01:51 : What Google really does with your personal information
- 01:10:42 : The business model of a rebel company
- 01:31:15 : “An unencrypted email is like a letter without an envelope.”
- 01:40:40 : Lumo: Proton's 100% encrypted model
- 01:58:48 : His dream of European sovereignty
- 02:18:35 : Who will win the AI race?
- 02:34:00 : Proton's next innovations
- 02:42:11 : “I sued Apple.”
We referred to previous GDIY episodes :
- #555 - Philippe Aghion - Prix Nobel d’économie - Redresser la France et l’Europe
- #543 - Yann Le Cun - AMI Labs - Rendre l’IA plus humaine
- #397 - Yann Le Cun - Meta - L’Intelligence Artificielle Générale ne viendra pas de Chat GPT
A few recent episodes in English :
- #570 - Eric Schmidt - Google, Relativity Space - What will be the next chapter in human history ?
- #564 - VO - Mati Staniszewski - ElevenLabs - "Humans were never meant to write, but to speak."
- #557 - VO - Robert Gentz - Zalando - Building a Shopping Empire on Flip Flops
- #551 - VO - Simon Squibb - Content creator - The Dreams Maker
- #542 - VO - Yoni Assia - eToro - “AI Will Replace Most Traders in 18 Months”
- #513 - VO - Jesper Brodin - IKEA - 40 billion in revenue empire with no bank loan
- #500 - VO - Reid Hoffman - LinkedIn, Paypal - How to master humanity’s most powerful invention
- #487 - VO - Anton Osika - Lovable - Internet, Business, and AI: Nothing Will Ever Be the Same Again
- #475 - VO - Shane Parrish - Farnam Street - Clear Thinking: The Decision-Making Expert
- #473 - VO - Brian Chesky - Airbnb - « We're just getting started »
- #452 - VO - Reid Hoffman - LinkedIn, Paypal - L’humanité 2.0 : Homo technicus plus qu’Homo sapiens
- #437 - James Dyson - Dyson - “Failure is more exciting than success”
- #431 - Sean Rad - Tinder - How the swipe fever took over the world
We spoke about :
- CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research)
- Chat Control, the EU regulation on message scanning
- Proton
- Michel Devoret, 2025 Nobel Prize in Physics
- Lumo, Proton’s confidential AI assistant
- Proton Foundation, Proton’s main shareholder
- Arrest of Pavel Durov (Telegram) in France
- The “996” system in Chinese tech
- Proton Easy Switch: leaving Gmail for Proton Mail
- Philippe Aghion and creative destruction (Schumpeter)
- Proton vs Apple: the App Store class action
Reading Recommendations :
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Brevo: brevo.com/doit
eToro: https://bit.ly/3GTSh0k
Payfit: payfit.com
Club Med : clubmed.fr
Cuure : https://cuure.com/product-onely
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