This is Andy Yen, CEO of Proton, and Samuele Kaplun, CTO of Proton VPN. Our mission is to make privacy and internet freedom a reality for everyone.
Recently, the New York Times did an in-depth story about our fight for Russia’s Internet by developing [our Stealth protocol](https://protonvpn.com/blog/stealth-vpn-protocol/) an advanced technology that bypasses many forms of government censorship.
Our VPN team is in a continuous cat-and-mouse game, going up against governments with billions of dollars behind them that fund censorship technology. We hope it will have a happy ending, but it’s not guaranteed. These countries block us, we fight back and win, then they block us again.
We keep going because access to the internet is a fundamental human right and it’s crucial to preserving freedom online. If organizations and privacy-first companies like Proton don’t fight for it, then maybe nobody else will.
EDIT: Thanks everybody who participated, it was really a pleasure to speak with all of you, but as it is past midnight in Geneva now, we will be signing off. However, you can join our subreddits on r/ProtonVPN, r/ProtonMail, and r/ProtonDrive. !lock
Would you say Switzerland still a role model when it comes to data protection and privacy?
I am asking because Switzerland has introduced more and more questionable laws in recent years. For example the “anti terror” law or the intelligence act from 2016. Switzerland is also far behind when it comes to the GDPR from the EU. Isn’t it just a marketing phrase at this point? And what makes Sweden and Iceland considered privacy friendly?
Any future plans for a Secure Core connection with an exit in Switzerland, Sweden or Iceland?
( Reason for asking I find myself debating between using Secure Core or a direct connection to Switzerland, Sweden or Iceland:
Option 1: Direct connect to Switzerland, Sweden or Iceland. This ensures my exit IP is in a privacy friendly country. But no guarantee the server I use is actually owned by Proton.
Option 2: Secure Core connection. This ensures the entry servers is owned Proton. But my exit will not be in a privacy friendly country (CH,SW,IS).
Does Proton have any plans (or current capabilities) to implement Forward Secrecy, to protect against future quantum computing capabilities that could be used (again, in the future) to decrypt replayed network streams that are logged today?
I recently subscribed to a month of your Proton VPN service in December and while I found the service itself fantastic, for the brief few days I used it, however your billing practices have left me pretty dissatisfied. I’ll share my experience with a couple points of contention.
Why is it so difficult to cancel your service? Something as simple as turning off auto-renew is made purposefully difficult. One cannot simple set the plan to not auto-renew. The only option available is to cancel your plan and receive a pro-rated refund of the remainder of the month.
I wasn’t interested in renewing after my first month, but I still wanted to use your service for the month I paid for, and due to the fact that I had no option to turn off auto-renewal without cancelling the service outright, I deliberately left less than the €9.99 renewal cost for another month on my debit card that you retained on file.
I thought that would be the end of it and the plan would be automatically cancelled when the payment was declined. Not so. Your company attempted three times to bill my debit card for €9.99. When that was unsuccessful, you pro-rated the partial month down to €2.63 as part of a “cancellation invoice”, and again, you attempted to charge my card. For whatever reason this time (perhaps due to the small amount?) my bank authorized the amount. Only it overdrafted my account and consequently my bank charged a $29 fee.
When I contacted your support, I notified them that these billing practices were borderline predatory, and requested a refund of the €2.63 that incited the overdraft. However, your representative (Elena) was completely unsympathetic and refused any refund.
As a first time experience of using your service, I’m frustrated with how difficult your billing process is and how uncooperative your customer service is. It’s absolutely left a poor taste in my mouth where I won’t be considering using your services in the future.
Hello, when will a proton drive sync client for windows (and linux if possible) finally be released? It’s the only thing keeping me from moving fully to proton drive.
I want to use a VPN but can’t use anything that requires installing custom software on my devices because some of those devices are things like game consoles.
So, I need a VPN that can be set up at my home router, which I believe is called “VPN termination.” A surprising number of well-known VPN products don’t support VPN termination, making them a deal-breaker.
I currently have a Unlimited subscription. I would like to share it with my family, but currently is to expensive to subscribe one account for each family person. Have you thinking about family plans with affordable price?
You mention Russia, China, Iran as threats to internet privacy, but what about the US? Do you see the US government either legislatively or covertly trying to break internet privacy in the US?