Proton is trying to become Google without your data

But they'll give your data away if asked.

What do you mean with that?

From what I understand, there are legitimate issues around Protonmail and its affiliation with government agencies [1]. It’s not as if it’s impossible to find a different provider that does better in this regard.

[1] This provides a decent summary: https://encryp.ch/blog/disturbing-facts-about-protonmail/

I mean, they are legally obligated to. At least they are not selling my data to advertisers or arbitrarily locking me out of my account like google. Hell, i'd pay for their premium service if wasn't so expensive and they accepted anonymous payments through monero or something.

I mean, this is what email has basically come to. I've tried to host my own email server, all my outbound mail ends up in spam. If you want privacy, use PGP

Edit: please don't downvote this parent comment, I think it is still a pretty reasonable concern

This is a rather interesting interview style, it seems as if the interviewer is presenting the viewpoints of the national security state complex ("we need total access to all data to prevent terrorism and child abuse") and of the major tech conglomerates ("competition reduces privacy"), aka Big MAMAA (FAANG is obsolete), but it does provide the interviewee with opportunity to counter those points, so I guess it's a decent interview approach.

I'd add that the solution to child abuse and terrorism is the same it has ever been, i.e. targeted investigations relying on tactics like infiltration of criminal rings with undercover officers. There's no justification for Gestapo/NKVD authoritarianism and mass surveillance tactics.

However, there doesn't seem to be any plausible way to communicate with others using any infrastructure-type system (from postal mail to fiber optic cable) that doesn't reveal the network of communication (i.e. metadata), and Tor is hardly an exception. Tor seems to have been designed to allow remote government agents (aka spies) operating in hostile environments a means to communicate with a known base of operations without revealing their actual remote locations or identity. Similarly it could be used by individuals to communicate with journalists (as Edward Snowden did) without revealing their identity or location, but only if they take a lot of precautions (i.e. not using their device for any other online activity that could be traced to them). I imagine NSA has backdoors into almost all Tor nodes anyway. The content can be securely encrypted, but location/identity? Probably not.