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| Formerly | Proton Technologies AG |
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| Founded | 16 May 2014 |
| Headquarters | , Switzerland [1] |
Area served | Worldwide |
Key people |
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| Products | |
| Owner | Proton Foundation [3] (majority) |
Number of employees | 500 (2024) [4] |
| Subsidiaries |
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| Website |
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Proton AG is a Swiss technology company offering privacy-focused online services which is majority owned by the non-profit Proton Foundation.
In May 2022, Proton updated the visuals, user interface, and logos of all its products to ensure a consistent design and launched a new subscription plan known as Proton Unlimited that includes all Proton services for US$9.99 per month, while still keeping individual single product plans. [5]
Proton Mail was released as a public beta on 16 May 2014 [6] as an end-to-end encrypted email service after a year of crowdfunding, by a group of scientists who met at CERN. [7] [8] Proton Mail 2.0 was released 14 August 2015, with open source front-end clients and a rewritten codebase. [9]
On 18 July 2024, Proton launched a private AI writing assistant for Proton Mail. Scribe can help write, proofread, shorten, or formalize emails. Users can run the AI assistant locally on their devices or through Proton's servers.
As of 2024, Proton Scribe is only available for Proton Visionary, Family & Duo subscription plans. Proton business users can add Proton Scribe as a paid add-on to their existing business subscriptions. [10] [11]
After over a year of crowdfunding, Proton Mail released Proton VPN on 22 May 2017, a secure VPN service provider. [12]
It has a no-logging policy, is located in Switzerland, and has DNS and WebRTC IP address leakage prevention. It is accessible online through Tor, [13] the clearnet, and its mobile applications.
On 21 January 2020, Proton announced that Proton VPN would now be open source, to allow independent security experts to analyze it, becoming the first VPN service to do so, simultaneously announcing that an independent security audit had been conducted. [14] [15]
On 1 May 2020, Proton VPN reported that they had a total of 809 servers, located in 50 different countries, all owned and operated by itself. [16] [17]
By 19 February 2025, the company had a total of 11,496 servers, located in 117 countries, with all new and preexisting servers operated and owned by Proton. [18]
Proton Calendar is a fully encrypted calendar app. [19]
Proton Drive is a cloud storage solution with end-to-end encryption, launched in September 2022 after being in beta testing since 2020. [20]
SimpleLogin is an open source email alias service that allows users to use email aliases to protect their privacy online and protect their main inbox from spam and phishing attacks.[ citation needed ]
SimpleLogin also provides additional security features such as PGP encryption and two-factor authentication on a variety of platforms including the web, mobile apps and browser extensions.
After being acquired by Proton in early 2022, SimpleLogin functionality is integrated into Proton Mail, Proton Pass, and subtly in the whole ecosystem, allowing the Proton community to hide their email addresses with SimpleLogin.
Released for public beta on 20 April 2023, [21] Proton Pass is a cloud based password manager solution with end-to-end encryption.
As of June 28, 2023, it is available to all Proton users. [22]
It also allows users to generate email aliases via SimpleLogin, however uses its own domains instead of the SimpleLogin ones.
Standard Notes is an end-to-end encrypted note-taking application, which was announced to be acquired by Proton on April 10, 2024. [23] [24]
The team that created Standard Notes worked with Proton and released a document taking service named Proton Docs. [24]
Proton Wallet is an open-source cryptocurrency wallet with end-to-end encryption to ensure that no one else has access to the wallet encryption keys. [25]
Both Proton Mail and Proton VPN are located in Switzerland and Swiss privacy laws apply. [26]
Proton AG complies with law enforcement requests to help identify Proton users if the request is valid under Swiss law, as in the case of a climate activist sought by French authorities in 2021. [27]
Proton AG stated in 2020 to have complied to 3017 requests and contested 750 orders out of 3572 orders for user information. [28]
While product-related data is usually end-to-end encrypted or not stored, certain account information is able to be passed to authorities with a valid court order, like client IP addresses (if logging is enabled) or recovery email. [29]
Proton Mail maintains and owns its own server hardware and network in order to avoid utilizing a third party.
It maintains two data centers, one in Lausanne and another in Attinghausen (in the former K7 military bunker under 1,000 meters (3,300 ft) of granite rock) as a backup. [30] [31] [32]
Each data center uses load balancing across web, mail, and SQL servers, redundant power supply, hard drives with full disk encryption, and exclusive use of Linux and other open-source software. [33]
In December 2014, Proton Mail joined the RIPE NCC in an effort to have more direct control over the surrounding Internet infrastructure. [34]
Proton is headquartered in Plan-les-Ouates, Geneva, Switzerland. [35] [36] [37]
Since June 2024, the majority of Proton AG is owned by the Proton Foundation. [38]
Proton's founder publicly announced on June 17, 2024, that Proton AG is now majority-owned by the Proton Foundation. The current members of the board of trustees are Andy Yen, Antonio Gambardella, Carissa Véliz, Tim Berners-Lee and Dingchao Lu. [39]
Proton AG was initially funded through crowdfunding and now is through its paid subscription. [40]
The company has been partially funded by FONGIT [41] [36] [37] [42] (the Fondation Genevoise pour l'Innovation Technologique) and the European Commission. [43]
In March 2021, Proton confirmed that the shares held by Charles Rivers Ventures had been transferred to FONGIT. [44]
On April 8, 2022, Proton acquired French email aliasing startup SimpleLogin. [45] [46] [47] [48]
Proton has stated SimpleLogin will continue to function as a standalone service and the SimpleLogin team will continue to add new features and functionality. [49]
On April 12, 2024, Proton acquired note taking app Standard Notes. [50]
Proton takes a position against Big Tech monopolies and advocates for greater regulation of Big Tech companies. [51] Proton helped found the Coalition for App Fairness, which aims to gain better conditions for the inclusion of their apps in app stores. [52] Proton is also a member of the Coalition for Competitive Digital Markets, which brings together 50+ European tech companies supporting open, interoperable and competitive digital markets. [53] Proton representatives have previously praised Republicans, including Gail Slater, the Republican nominee for antitrust enforcement, while also supporting Democrat-led efforts to pass the American Innovation and Choice Online Act during the Biden administration. [54] [55]
Proton also takes a pro-encryption stance. In December 2023, Proton's founder publicly vowed to challenge the Australian eSafety Commission in court rather than comply with demands to weaken Proton Mail's privacy features. [56] In February 2025, in response to reports that Apple is removing encryption from iCloud in the UK in response to UK govt demands for a backdoor, Proton published a statement saying that the company would never build an encryption backdoor, but that it wouldn't open the front door either by removing end-to-end encryption. [57]
{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: numeric names: authors list (link)The founder of encrypted email service Proton has said the company would fight the Australian online safety regulator in court if forced to weaken encryption under proposed standards. [...] Andy Yen, the founder and chief executive of Proton, told Guardian Australia the proposed standards "would force online services, no matter whether they are end-to-end encrypted or not, to access, collect, and read their users' private conversations".
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| Open source | |
| Discontinued | |
