As the world’s most popular secure and privacy-focused email service, our ethos and business model are very different from email services such as Gmail, which scan users’ inboxes and make money from advertising.
PROTONMAIL.COM - Jan 13, 2021 -
ProtonMail was created to help build a more free and open internet that puts people first. This makes it a great Gmail alternative for those who value privacy and security. Founded by scientists who met at CERN, ProtonMail protects all messages with end-to-end encryption and zero-access encryption to ensure nobody can access your emails’ contents.
As the world’s most popular secure and privacy-focused email service, our ethos and business model are very different from email services such as Gmail, which scan users’ inboxes and make money from advertising.
We never spy on our users’ emails, and our service is ad-free. We are based in Switzerland, which is famous for its neutrality. And as a company that puts people first, our interests are perfectly aligned with those of our users.
Tech giants such as Google, Twitter, and Facebook make fortunes from invading the privacy of users. They also exercise
a worrying degree of control over the internet. Until 2017, Google scanned all emails sent to or from Gmail users to help build detailed profiles of its users that would allow it to target them with highly personalized ads.
It has since promised to stop this practice, but it continues to scan emails so it can offer features such as Smart Labels and add travel details to Google Calendar, trading privacy for convenience. Google also scans all the receipts you receive in Gmail and stores the data for years, even if your purchases are not from Google.
Simply put, nothing sent via Gmail should be considered private.
In this article, we explain what factors to consider when searching for a Gmail replacement service and how ProtonMail addresses these. ProtonMail offers a free plan that takes only a few seconds to get started with, so it’s easy to try it out for yourself. (No personal data is required to create a free account.)
Better than Gmail privacy
Unlike Gmail, ProtonMail was built from the ground up with privacy and not data collection as our primary focus.
This starts with our use of strong encryption to ensure nobody can access your messages or abuse them for advertising purposes. ProtonMail can’t spy on your emails, even if we wanted to.
We minimize the collection of metadata, for instance, by turning off IP logging by default. And no personal information is required to create a free account.
As a Switzerland-based email provider, your data is protected by strong Swiss privacy laws. This makes it impossible for us to share any of the (little) data we have with foreign countries without an order from the Swiss authorities.
Our Privacy Policy is short, straightforward, and easy to understand.
In short, ProtonMail’s goal is to provide you with a private inbox that you can use to send and receive messages securely. Gmail’s goal is to collect more of your personal data so Google can use it to target you with ads. This becomes clear when you compare the two app’s different approaches to data collection.
True security
All emails are secured in transit using TLS encryption and are stored on our servers with zero-access encryption using your private key. This means even we cannot read any of your messages or hand them over to third parties.
For additional security, all emails between ProtonMail users are secured with automatic end-to-end encryption. This means that emails are encrypted by you on your own device and can only be decrypted and read by the intended recipients.
It is also possible to send end-to-end encrypted emails to non-ProtonMail users. ProtonMail also includes native support for the OpenPGP email encryption standard, enabling interoperability with existing PGP users.
Because we store all emails sent or received using zero-access encryption, they are safe from being exploited for profit by services such as Google.
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