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Rendered at 21:21:20 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
Business users are their focus and outside select industries, vast majority of businesses don't care if government is spying or not. Heck, most businesses would turn over information to government without any fight. It's just not something they worry about.
I was shocked recently when I looked into this to find out the number of solutions out there.
But isn’t WebRTC already trivially end to end encrypted?
We built an entire encrypted and decentralized peer to peer videoconferencing and livestreaming system years ago, and made it open source so anyone can host it: https://community.qbix.com/t/teleconferencing-and-live-broad...
No complains from it so far. People get it, book with success, and I run those calls on Proton Meet, which also proved to work pretty well.
So does that mean two people using this in the US will both have high latency to another country?
LiveKit Cloud uses virtual compute and networking across multiple (USA based) cloud providers. DigitalOcean, Google and Oracle at minimum. They each have servers all of the world of course, but the controlling entity(s) parent companies are all based in the USA.
Latency shouldn’t be a problem, it's handled by a global CDN.
Proton including that part about geopolitical instability implies that Meet is does not fall under the USA's CLOUD Act - that would be wrong. The metadata of any Meet call could be handed to USA authorities, for example the participants date & time, source IP and useragent of each member. The call itself should be E2E encrypted.
I do worry about it and I think lots of people will as well for other reasons.
One of them is screen sharing.
- how do I prove that they are actually not privacy friendly?
France’s data protection regulator (CNIL) fined Google €325 million in 2025 for displaying ads between Gmail messages without consent and for placing cookies during account creation without consent. This is on top of prior fines of €100 million in 2020 and €150 million in 2021 for cookie violations, so this is a documented pattern.
The Dutch government commissioned Data Protection Impact Assessments (DPIAs) on Office/Microsoft 365. The 2018 report found Microsoft collected 23,000–25,000 different telemetry events from Office and called it “large scale and covert collection of personal data”
The FTC went after Zoom in 2020. The complaint alleged that since at least 2016, Zoom misled users by claiming “end-to-end, 256-bit encryption” when it actually provided a lower level of security, and Zoom saved the cryptographic keys that would allow it to access the content of customers’ meetings.
You could also just go read their own policy documents, or ask AI to explain what is possible under those to you if they are too dense.
May 7th 2020: https://www.zoom.com/en/blog/zoom-acquires-keybase-and-annou...
May 22nd 2020: https://github.com/zoom/zoom-e2e-whitepaper
E2EE seems to be available to free accounts https://support.zoom.com/hc/en/article?id=zm_kb&sysparm_arti...
(opinions are my own etc.)
https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2014/03/metadata_surv...
I used to analyse PPs to detect usage of data brokers, and I’ll confidently say that these 2 have some of the worst policies out there, although less obvious companies such as Netflix and Spotify also had appalling conditions.
If a policy is compatible with data brokerage, you can very well assume they do it, and that means they’ll share your data and get shared data about you in return. But hey, “we don’t SELL your data!”
One side is hostile and focused on solely on shareholder profits, while other claims to be privacy-focused and majority owned by a nonprofit foundation.
There are enough public cases of American tech companies seriously violating privacy. I don't see how there can be hope for any privacy while using any of their products even if E2EE is claimed.
/s
Edit: I thought you were joking and that the answer was more like printing presses and a lack of an official "standard English" in the 1700s/1800s, but it turns out the answer really was closer to what you said. Noah Webster deliberately decided to make American English diverge from British English when he wrote his dictionary.
Proton makes safer, more private (than, say, Gmail) email a possibility for people who don't have much technical knowledge but who know enough to want to keep their emails out of Google's hands.
If you have both the knowledge and time to run a server, by all means, that can make sense (and can be fun!). It's just not as widely applicable.
The point of ownership is having your mails in your hand, on your iron, anything who can talk IMAPs or even POP is ok for that. For voice/chat etc Matrix or XMPP might be yours, so nobody could decide to ban you or shut the service down. You still depend on a ISP ok, but much less dependencies anyway. That's the point IMVHO.
While thinking that company X is better in privacy terms than company Y is honestly meaningless, you can trust them or not, you don't know what happen on their servers or someone else ones where they actually live on (like using Amazon o Microsoft cloud as a backend).
proton meet is already targeting a really niche set of customers, and you're taking it to another level.
I actually appreciate how they balance features and new products. They are becoming more credible MS365/Google Workspace alternatives with every step.
https://www.reddit.com/r/ProtonMail/comments/1bptl3c/shared_...
Google docs may not be private but it takes <1 second to load when I click the browser bookmark, vs 11 seconds to load a Proton document.
11-second load time for a page is a lot of friction in 2026, no matter how secure your product is.
I also wish I could afford Proton as a non-pro user…
I would love to build on proton but Alas the API isn't open source and recently with Proton meet and its controversy, my trust on proton has shifted a bit too which dampened my enthusiasm in all of this.
(To make the API I even used puppeeter instances to do it, and after quite a long time I was able to succeed actually but that's just not scalable)