Pourquoi Proton quitte la Suisse ? #10minutes pour comprendre (youtube.com)
Heading to Germany and Norway, because Switzerland is going to go from secure and neutral to surveillance state, it seems. Germany is the the champion of all categories of safeguards, he says. The constitutional court of Germany has overturned mass retention 3 times, and the EU Court of Justice has watched over it. Norway applies the GDPR, powers its own data centers and has natural cooling, and remains politically stable. Switzerland risks losing 'trust, which powers the connected economy.'
While this thing hasn't been enacted in Switzerland yet, and maybe it can be viewed as a necessary challenge to the seriousness of Switzerland in privacy, ie they have privacy, and politicians try to remove it but it defeats these politicians over and over again... That could happen, but it's a slow and uncertain process, so not worth the risk of it not beating those politicians. Proton started to move away a while ago when there first started to be signs of this, reportedly, even though the Swiss state monitoring will be rolled out slowly over several years. By that time Proton will be somewhere else, it seems. But we should note that Switzerland already failed years ago, when it changed course, after for decades being renowned for privacy in finance, which everyone knows is one of the most important domains of privacy, and gave in to US government demands and removed all it's privacy protections. That can be seen as a change in course overall, away from independent and strong to a client or subservient of the US, perhaps, although we don't know the reasons the individuals in charge did that.
OSCPT2025.
Over 5000 users, you have to give a permanent pipeline to a state monitoring authority. Not talking about the ability for a judge to grant a warrant, but instead just real time surveillance of everything that passes through. Stored for 6 months on servers external to the company. Full duplication for the state. A permanent flow between the applications and the authorities.
Proton's moto is ‘No logs ever.’
Don't depend on states. Depend on technology.