Yes, privacy is different today: There’s less privacy. But the more important question for society is: Are we okay with that, and do we understand the implications and downsides of that? And I would say until very recently this was not widely understood.
Is it appropriate for technologies like ours to be used in this way? And to answer that: Technology is blind. Especially when it comes to something like encryption, at the end of the day it’s mathematics. So you cannot devise encryption in such a way that it gives one answer for the good guys and a different answer for the bad guys. Mathematics always serves you the same exact answer, no matter the situation.
Nowadays, when you look at the Facebook situation, I think people are starting to realise why privacy actually does matter. And the issue with companies like Facebook and, to a much larger extent, Google is that they have a business model that’s fundamentally built on the idea of creating a massive apparatus that captures as much data as possible. If your business model is collecting a tonne of data and analysing it, that data is going to be misused eventually. That’s almost inevitable.
It’s definitely possible to do security online. If you look at ProtonMail and our technology, there’s really nothing special we do that a company like Google cannot do. The reason Google doesn’t do what we do is because it’s not in their financial interest. So it’s not technical limitation of the internet. It’s entirely a business limitation.
