Pierluigi Paganini
March 17, 2016
ProtonMail, the world’s largest privacy-focused and encrypted email provider, announced today that the service is leaving beta and will be allowing open registrations for the first time in nearly two years. For the past couple of years, ProtonMail has been invite-only, more that one million users had the opportunity to test the beta. The service also presented its free mobile apps available for both Apple iOS and Android devices.
ProtonMail was first launched in beta in May 2014 by a group of scientists who met at CERN and MIT, but its popularity reached the peak after the disclosure of the Snowden‘s revelation on the mass-surveillance operated by the FiveEyes alliance.
The company then received an impressive amount of demands for new accounts that forced it to create a waiting list. According to the company, the requests exceeded 10,000 per day.
ProtonMail is an essential instrument to protect our privacy, businesses, journalists, activists, security experts, private individuals, me … and Mr Robot, already use it.
The email service implements the end-to-end encryption allowing users to communicate securely on the Internet making impossible for law enforcement and intelligence agencies to eavesdrop the traffic.
In the End-to-end Encryption model data is encrypted on the sender’s system before passing it to the servers of the service provider, which turn the encrypted data to the intended recipient, who is the only entity who can decrypt it.
Of course, this isn’t a good moment for companies that offers such kind of services, ProtonMail has been frequently thrust into the public debate over encryption and terrorism, and in several cases it had problems with governments to protect user privacy.
“Strong encryption and privacy are a social and economic necessity, not only does this technology protect activists and dissidents, it is also key to securing the world’s digital infrastructure,” says ProtonMail Co-Founder Dr. Andy Yen, “this is why all things considered, strong encryption is absolutely necessary for the greater good.”
ProtonMail has decided to open the service for public registration, this means that everyone can obtain an account for free immediately.
“The best way to ensure that encryption and privacy rights are not encroached upon is to get the tools into the hands of the public as soon as possible and widely distributing them,” says Yen, “This way, we put the choice in the hands of the consumer, and not government regulators.”
“The past decade has been marked by a massive erosion of privacy and we’re working to reverse this trend,” says Yen. “Encrypted communications is the future and ProtonMail is committed to making online privacy a reality again for all Internet users.”
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(Security Affairs – ProtonMail, privacy)
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