YouSaid · the spoken record

Nili G. Shalev

lines on the record: 105
first: 2026-07-16
most recent: 2026-07-16
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“mean that I give them control to do whatever they want with it or that I trust them not to lose it. So we're going to try and build a system where I retain that control and I can still participate in modern services, modern online services, right?”
2026-07-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Proton’s CTO: No company is going to jail for you · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Okay, you know, that can be a decision. And it's our job to build a user interface which communicates what the consequences of that are. But privacy is fundamentally. It's not about not sharing stuff. It's not about not sharing your photos. It's not about not sharing your data with third parties. It's about sharing the data with third parties who you choose, right? And not just by default with everybody, which is sort of the paradigm that's been the big tech paradigm for Web 2.0 or whatever you want to call it, the last two decades. So I think that we can reconcile this with the proton thing because it was never just about the encryption. Like the encryption is a tool to the end. It's all about, hey, the fact that I put the fact that I store data on somebody else's computer on the internet does not”
2026-07-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Proton’s CTO: No company is going to jail for you · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“If you want people outside Proton in your mailing list, then we can't do end-to-end encryption anymore. We have to turn it off, right? So when you add external people to your mailing list, you are prompted, hey, do you want to turn external recipients and you turn off in an encryption? The user says yes, okay, because that's part of their workflow. They need it. And at that point, we still don't save a copy, right? Everything saves on Proton is encrypted at rest. However, we do have the clear text email going through our system because we need to send it out to whoever the external recipients are. That's the kind of model I see in the future with some of these. And it's not just AI systems, it's also integrations, especially as we get more into business clients and stuff. I need this integration into my CRM, right? I'm going to choose to share this mailbox with my CRM.”
2026-07-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Proton’s CTO: No company is going to jail for you · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We have a mailing list feature, and that feature is done in a way that it is private. I send you an email or I send the mailing list an email. It sends the email to everybody else. The system doesn't see it. Okay.”
2026-07-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Proton’s CTO: No company is going to jail for you · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Mentioned before is privacy is control. Privacy is sort of self determination in the sense that you control your data and you control who it's shared with. And maybe that who is an II system, right? And that's okay. And I think as long as this is sort of an opt-in thing from the user, this is actually an internal debate. But we already have... Features like, for instance, okay, we have a mailing list feature. I promise this has something to do with it. It's a big”
2026-07-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Proton’s CTO: No company is going to jail for you · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Ask you on the ocean of that, right? You mentioned earlier now it is possible to look at all the emails and do mass surveillance. You know, Anthropic rolled up to the United States governments. Like you can do this with our model. We don't want you to because we don't actually think it's good enough and we think there's like real problems with doing that. You're faced with that as well, right? You have your own internal AI model. Your user probably generating more data inside of your systems than ever before with AI. It just seems like a thing that happens when you add AI to a system. The models get better when you feed them more data. They have a voracious appetite for data. That's a lot of pressure on we're going to keep everything private, right? It's a lot of pressure on who gets to see your stuff and why they get to see it and what can they do once they have it and the value of having it seems to be going up right the value of collecting all the data seems to be going up. How do you respond to that even as you have to roll out AI systems in order to compete with the big tech that is putting it literally everywhere?”
2026-07-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Proton’s CTO: No company is going to jail for you · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The most affected industry and the most tractable industry for LMs that I've seen, at least so far. Obviously there are other uses for it, but it's software, it's rule-based, you can test for correctness, you can mitigate a lot of the things that LLMs might kind of go off the rails and hallucination. At the end of the day, you need working code, right? So you can test this kind of stuff. So you can mitigate a lot of the problems with LLMs. Software is your best case scenario. And even then, from what I've seen, It's an evolution. It's not a revolution. It's definitely a big change, but it's largely a productivity change, not a dump everything, start over. Maybe I'm wrong about that. Maybe as models improve, it'll get more and more dramatic.”
2026-07-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Proton’s CTO: No company is going to jail for you · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Now there are other bottlenecks in your pipeline that you have to do. Now maybe your CI takes too long. Now maybe your other things take too long, right? So it changes maybe what kinds of things you need to optimize. But at the end of the day, I think for most senior software engineers, the amount of time that they actually spent writing code was frankly not either the hardest part of their job or what they spent most of their time on, right? Software is probably the most”
2026-07-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Proton’s CTO: No company is going to jail for you · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“the LLM will actually work better if your code is a spaghetti mess the LM will not work as well because they're you know they're logic engines right there's more chances for them to get confused so a lot of the fundamentals of building software yes the industry has changed but a lot of the fundamentals of building software are different the other thing we found is that you know your the time you spend writing code has gone down”
2026-07-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Proton’s CTO: No company is going to jail for you · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In software engineering towards more senior level skills, perhaps, right? But it's not fundamentally changed what good software is or how to architect good software, whatever. If anything, things like reviewing other people's code. Well, today you're reviewing other people's code and you're reviewing a robot's code, but it's kind of the same skill, right? I mean, so what may be the balance before was a little more towards, okay, Can you write code very quickly, accurately with, you know, this kind of thing where now it's like, okay, it's more towards can you review code very quickly? But that's, which is maybe a more senior level skill, but it's still part of the software engineer toolkit, designing good software. What good software means like one thing that we found, I think, is that LLMs work a lot better when your code is well architected. Like if your code is well designed,”
2026-07-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Proton’s CTO: No company is going to jail for you · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“being able to cook up your own custom purchase order software or ERP or whatever that works for your small business maybe sort of and the kind of things whether it's compliance whether it's scaling whether it's reliability all these things which enterprises need I just can't cannot see every company building you know oh software is dead we're not going to have vendors to do this that can promise us things that we need right To me, if anything, it shifted what is valued.”
2026-07-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Proton’s CTO: No company is going to jail for you · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“How is AI going to affect the industry in general and maybe how it's affected us and how we use it? So for a lot of our stuff, in particular the client-side stuff, is open source, right? So we, and the client-side stuff is not user secrets either. So we've also, we've tried out models from Anthropic and ChatGPT. We've also tried Lumo and Open because a lot of it's public anyway and it's not user secrets, right? So we're going to use the best tool to make us go as quickly as possible. And it has changed software engineering probably permanently, right? A lot of the, in terms of the amount of time spent on actually writing code versus the other things. But maybe not so fundamentally. I mean, people talk about this SaaS apocalypse thing that every company is going to be running their own enterprise software and I just don't buy it. There's a very big difference between”
2026-07-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Proton’s CTO: No company is going to jail for you · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The few AI companies that actually makes money doing AI because we don't do any training, right? We just sell the inference. I mean, not that there's not a lot of work involved in doing. building Lumo, but yeah, we don't train our own models. I guess there are two different sides. There's the”
2026-07-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Proton’s CTO: No company is going to jail for you · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, no, it's open source models that we've compiled. And it's a collection of open source models that we sort of stitch together based on their strengths and weaknesses. But yeah, we, I mean, we don't have a billion dollars to sign up. That's what I'm asking to train our own models. And this is actually why we might be one of the few.”
2026-07-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Proton’s CTO: No company is going to jail for you · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I don't think it's had as much of a dramatic effect. The topics that we've discussed, we have Lumo, our own internal, which is run on we control the systems that is running on, and this is our, we want to be independent of third-party models and things like that.”
2026-07-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Proton’s CTO: No company is going to jail for you · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“What is your approach to all of this? Are you reliant on the frontier companies? Are you building your own model? How do you protect your data from them? All of this, at the very end, feels like it upsets in significant ways the structures and the systems we've been describing up until now.”
2026-07-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Proton’s CTO: No company is going to jail for you · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right, is like this debate from, I don't know, the 80s and 90s up until now is the same debate. And maybe AI is going to like flip over the whole Apple cart, right? We can now do cybersecurity at scale in ways that governments are stepping in and stopping them models from shipping, whether or not that is correct or not. That is the thing that is actually happening in the world. We can generate vast amounts of synthetic data that might trip all your detection systems, whether or not any harms are actually downstream of that data. You've shipped an AI assistant because a bunch of countries do not want to rely on American model companies and having data sovereignty in Europe is important to them. That seems like a market opportunity for you”
2026-07-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Proton’s CTO: No company is going to jail for you · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So there's something in your system. There's some set of indicators that you can detect and you're just not going to tell me what they are. But there's some set of indicators. How an account operates in your system that lets you know what it's being used for. Has any government ever asked you what that set of indicators is? Interesting. I'm just curious. Hopefully, that doesn't happen today. Cops, if you're listening, forget that you heard any of this. We're running out of time here. I do want to quickly at the end Ask about AI because we talked about systems and dynamics that I think are pretty familiar I came up on Usenet and slash dot and I probably heard that quote about liberty and security 10,000 times like that is the foundation of my life on the internet”
2026-07-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Proton’s CTO: No company is going to jail for you · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We got really, really good at killing ransomware accounts. And now we still occasionally will get them, but they'll have been disabled by us for abuse six months before we get the legal request. So I'm using the ransomware as an analogy, but we do have kind of a feedback loop.”
2026-07-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Proton’s CTO: No company is going to jail for you · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Relatively speaking, a lot of requests for ransomware accounts. Okay, because people go to Proton. A proton email that you would, I don't know, with a Bitcoin something, right? Whatever. We got, and we would get this in the legal request, right? We'd get this and we'd be able to look at that and say, oh, that's definitely a ransomware account for various reasons, right?”
2026-07-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Proton’s CTO: No company is going to jail for you · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's our entire thing. We also have a reporting system, of course. You know, people make mistakes like any other. So if, you know, if they share an image, which is this can be reported, that can go. So there are lots of mechanisms. Again, I'm sort of tiptoeing around saying any details because I don't want this stuff to not become effective. But we do a good job, I think, relative to external indicators that we can see. And yeah, I'll give you an example where this is, it's not CSAM, but it's a similar thing. We used to get a lot of requests.”
2026-07-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Proton’s CTO: No company is going to jail for you · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“that we can correlate this to some degree with the kind of legal requests we get and that those are pretty few and far between, right? I would think that if this were a massive problem on the platform that we would get a lot more legal requests for metadata regarding this. That is our proxy, not for CSAM in particular because we often don't know where the requests come, but in general, one of our proxies is, okay, how many legal requests are we getting for data as opposed to how much, how good we are at anti-abuse, right? If legal requests go through the roof, which they haven't, then obviously we have a big problem with anti-abuse. And that has not been the case. So I know that's kind of a wishy-washy answer, but the data is private. We can't read it.”
2026-07-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Proton’s CTO: No company is going to jail for you · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, the problem is, I don't know what the denominator is. I don't know if we found 50% of them. I don't know if we found 10% of them. I don't know if you found 1% of them. Because all I know is the stuff we found. And even then, it's a probabilistic, you know, we don't see the images, right? Sometimes we have a better clue, but I won't say how. I mean, but we don't see the images in any case. We are not legally capable of doing that, and God knows we don't want to subject our employees to that anyway. But no, we don't know what the denominator is. So I don't know how effective it is. I do know that”
2026-07-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Proton’s CTO: No company is going to jail for you · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Saying there's a system you can't quite describe that is effective at stopping the harms of C Salmon scale. Is that verifiable from some of the people that wish to impose regulations? Is it auditable security through obscurity has these problems, right? We have to trust you A lot of this conversation has come back to how much we can trust proton structurally, personally.”
2026-07-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Proton’s CTO: No company is going to jail for you · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Probably more that can be done in the sort of physical space as well to fight these kinds of abuse with resourcing and whatnot. But I will say, yeah, I'll repeat, content scanning is not the only way to do this. And there's also some content scanning that can be done without violating. This is very fraught too, but there are things that can be done to do this that don't violate privacy at a massive scale, which is a price that I think is simply too high.”
2026-07-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Proton’s CTO: No company is going to jail for you · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“For criminals. And as a result, it's not. We put nearly 10% of total company resources to fight abuse. We are dead serious about driving, you know, making abuse as little as possible on the platform. So it can be done. It's a cost center and one that we eat, right? It doesn't make us any money, but it can be done. I think the other thing is, you know, the digital sphere isn't the only place where these crimes are committed, right? And, you know, there's the physical sphere too. There's the actual victims. There's the actual people harmed by this. And I think, you know, everybody wants their job to be easier. Cops are not accepted from this, right? So they would love to scan everything on the internet. And I don't actually blame them for this request because it would make their jobs much easier and they really do want to reduce harm. However, I think we need to make a trade-off between that and the threat that is to free society as well. So I think that there's”
2026-07-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Proton’s CTO: No company is going to jail for you · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A lot of that, anyway, I probably shouldn't say it, but you can fight CSAM. I'm not saying it's the same. It's not as effective as scanning everything. But also in the age of AI image generation, who knows what's real or not? Not that AI generated CSAM is good, but the point is you don't know if there's a real victim, if there's not, et cetera. So I think there are alternatives to scanning every image that you can do to fight CSAM. And we've done this for years. And it's hard to know how effective we've been at it because we don't really know what the denominator is, but we have been, I think, at least in terms of networks that we've identified. We've identified some and we've shut them down and we've mitigated this. We have a strong interest in keeping bad actors of all kinds off the platform. The mission's not going to be served if it's if it's all this is a platform.”
2026-07-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Proton’s CTO: No company is going to jail for you · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I can't describe exactly what Proton does because anti-abuse is one of the things where security through obscurity really does actually help, right? It helps that the bad actors don't know what we do. But I can say that you can fight CSOM without content scanning. Like it is possible.”
2026-07-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Proton’s CTO: No company is going to jail for you · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Their response is the same as protons. There's no way to do this. We simply cannot give you a way to do this that does not create the backdoors for all the other bad actors you want. We're not going to do it. What are the solutions to mitigating the harms of CSAM without creating a backdoors? Because I feel like that is also missing from this conversation, especially when I talk to the activists who are laser focused on the scale of the harm.”
2026-07-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Proton’s CTO: No company is going to jail for you · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I don't know. That might be the whole answer. Let me ask you we talked about Asia replication. Not sure there's like an answer right that will solve every problem, but you've laid out some technical approaches that will at least balance the harms. When I said that harm is happening at Massesco, what I meant with CSAM, right? What I meant is child sexual abuse material, that is happening at Massescale over the internet. We all know it. There's lots and lots of ways to mitigate it. And then there's just platforms you can't see into where it's going to happen anyway. Proton is one of them iMessage is actually another if you fully encrypt iMessage. Apple gets a lot of criticism for that”
2026-07-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Proton’s CTO: No company is going to jail for you · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Might view it as simply a no win game in the sense that you can KYC know your customer as hard as you want, but there's going to be some that slip through and then you're responsible. So maybe they just want a third party to do it so that's not their problem, right? I don't know.”
2026-07-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Proton’s CTO: No company is going to jail for you · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I know you had been in a fight. Proton has been in a fight with Apple over App Store policies. Seems like one where their interest would be obvious to say, actually, we will maintain control. This 30%, like stop bothering us about the 30% regulators, because we will provide you age verification.”
2026-07-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Proton’s CTO: No company is going to jail for you · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A good question. I don't actually know. You'd think that they would jump at it, right? I mean, they certainly love having being the choke point of the app store and charging everybody 30%. I know you had been in a”
2026-07-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Proton’s CTO: No company is going to jail for you · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Regulation and having privacy requirements in the regulations is certainly the first step. Compliance implementations there at least have that baked in. I think also, and This is hard pushing it on the operating system manufacturers is also, which is can also be kind of dangerous because it helps entrench those choke points, right? We already have a lot of choke points where Google and Apple have these.”
2026-07-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Proton’s CTO: No company is going to jail for you · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“If I knew the answer, I would be pushing it. But partnerships are one of them. I think certainly regulatory guidelines about what you can store, what you can't store, how much you can know about your customers is probably key. The schizo maybe competition stuff a little bit. But a lot of our potential harms also comes from full vertical integration of a lot of stuff. So, you know, mandating that things be separate entities. I'm not going to flush that out. And this time, but this can do a lot to prevent certain types of harms and temptations to abuse stuff. But I think.”
2026-07-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Proton’s CTO: No company is going to jail for you · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I guess this is like you sit at the middle of it, your ideals and your structure prevent you from doing the cheapest, worst version of this. How do you make the industry match your values? Is it the regulator mandates the solution, which you seem to think is a bad idea? Is it they put constraints on the solution which lead everybody to do the right thing? Where does that come from?”
2026-07-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Proton’s CTO: No company is going to jail for you · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It would lead to the technical solution. This is kind of what I'm asking, right? Yeah, yeah. The guy runs and says, look, you have to start doing age verification. The kids are looking at all kinds of weird stuff online. We have to start dating some of this content the way that we gate, I don't know, foreign stores physically.”
2026-07-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Proton’s CTO: No company is going to jail for you · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I would Yeah, for sure. And I think in general the history of writing, the timescales are just so different. The history of writing exact solutions into regulatory frameworks is pretty dismal, right? But I think that the laws that do this could write things in ways that mandate privacy protections in a way that I think has not been done. that would lead.”
2026-07-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Proton’s CTO: No company is going to jail for you · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think it certainly helps if the industry comes together. There's an EU ID initiative, which is actually fairly good. It's not zero knowledge, but it's fairly good. There are some problems with this kind of credential, obviously digital credentials can be copied, so you want to make sure that it doesn't get copied and posted on the internet and used by a million people, right? So there's some anti-abuse trade-offs, right? You don't want one guy's ID from some country being used by every teenager in the US.”
2026-07-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Proton’s CTO: No company is going to jail for you · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Say a trusted person issue you an ID, it can be a local credential, right? It can be a credential, and it can also be a credential that's stored in the cloud, but in an encrypted way so the server can't see what the credential is and then have your device selectively disclose age over 18, you know, the site that you go to requires that. It doesn't have to be Is your address, this is your name, this is whatever. It can just be, oh, yes, this person has a cryptographically signed affidavit that says age of routine, let them in.”
2026-07-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Proton’s CTO: No company is going to jail for you · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Which basically involve the ability to prove that I am over 18 without actually giving you any other information about it. There's actually multiple ways to do that. Some which don't involve zero knowledge proofs, but these are a far cry from Discord got in trouble. I forget a month or two ago from having a security breach where, you know, they required, they did age verification, and then they had, I forget what it was, some sort of open S3 bucket or something with tons of people's IDs and stuff like this is not the right way to do it. But I guarantee you that people will do this wrong if every website has to collect your ID, we are in deep, right? So there are ways to have issuers have”
2026-07-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Proton’s CTO: No company is going to jail for you · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You cannot be free without privacy, right? So I think there's a trade-off to be made here, and we can discuss what the trade-off is, but the trade-off should not be that we make the entire system transparent to whoever wants to look. Because there are some really bad people who want to look. And even if you think that the government will never be that bad person, which okay seems naive, but even if you think that's the case, there's all kinds of cyber criminals and everywhere else. And those backdoors that, or vulnerabilities, I guess vulnerabilities are more easily because backdoors, but those vulnerabilities that have been found or introduced in cryptographic that have a long history of being exploited by bad actors, right? I mean, the history that this is clear. It's impossible to have a backdoor that can't be exploited by just except for the people who it's intended for. I think there are other ways to do this. I think we need to describe it.”
2026-07-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Proton’s CTO: No company is going to jail for you · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Balanced against restricting the freedom of adults to essentially be, you know, you can make society very, very, very secure by taking away all freedom whatsoever, right? You can do that. This is a trade-off of what we want to make, but I don't think people fully internalize the fact that too much security is maybe a world that they don't want to live in as well, right? Because it really, I think it was Ben Franklin. Again, not to be too American, but people who would trade in freedom for security deserve neither. I'm paraphrasing. I am American. I live in Europe now, but I am American originally, but there are a lot of people who really beat the drum of freedom in the U.S. but are willing to essentially give away all privacy. And I think, you know, privacy and freedom are inextricably connected.”
2026-07-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Proton’s CTO: No company is going to jail for you · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The concerns are legitimate, right? But we tolerate a lot of harms in the, we tolerate ingesting things that aren't good for you if you're an adult, right? And there have been, this is maybe US-centric, but there have been several, I mean, I don't know if it's still precedent the way things are going, but there have been several court precedents that have basically said that, and I think this actually has to do with scanning or otherwise that have said that, okay, these must be compatible.”
2026-07-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Proton’s CTO: No company is going to jail for you · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's impossible to create a back door that can only be used by the good guys. And the consequences of the backdoors being used by the bad guys are basically catastrophic, right? You mentioned, you know, there are still harms being perpetrated at these rates. And that massive.”
2026-07-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Proton’s CTO: No company is going to jail for you · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Solve this problem for you. I think there's some willful ignorance on the part of the regulators. I think the regulators know this. And then I think there's a massive activists who want to protect children who maybe they do understand it. Maybe they don't understand it. But what they certainly understand at a visceral level is the kids are being harmed, right? And all of the other systems that everyone claims can ameliorate to problems or mitigate the risk to encryption do not actually exist such that the kids are not being harmed at the rate they're being harmed today. You sit in the middle of this, right? The governments of the world come to you. They've asked you for backdoors. They've asked you for client-side scanning of chat messages to detect CSAM. What's your response to just be smart, just nerd harder and figure it out?”
2026-07-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Proton’s CTO: No company is going to jail for you · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So much easier to do this. So the fact that Facebook and Google arguably with their ad ecosystems have built the most sophisticated China perhaps, but the most sophisticated surveillance systems ever built, right? And we do the most American thing ever with it, which is we use them to sell you crap you don't need, right? But that doesn't mean that's the only use for those. And the fact that those are sitting on the mantelpiece like Chekhov's gun waiting for somebody to pick them up and do something truly horrific with them is a threat to free society. And all this other, you know, all this other stuff with check control and age verification is the same thing. It's saying we have this harm. Let's build a system to prevent this harm that then can be used for really nefarious purposes. We need to make sure that we don't engineer systems that”
2026-07-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Proton’s CTO: No company is going to jail for you · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Internet, right? We want to build systems, internet systems, that can't be commandeered like this. This is how we would proton, but I think this principle applies to the larger internet. This is a kind of a thought experiment, right? But there was some, I'm probably going to butcher this, but there was some crazy statistic that a huge fraction of East Germans were actually employed as informants by the Stasi on the other East Germans, right? In the height of the Cold War. The Iron Curtain, of course, fell pretty much right before the dawn of the digital age in some ways, the internet age, right? I think you could argue, and I think you can look at counterfactual or counter examples like China and what I think you could argue that had some of this, the Eastern Bloc authoritarian regimes made it into the digital age, that maybe they would have had enough control over information to not fall anymore, right? Because it's”
2026-07-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Proton’s CTO: No company is going to jail for you · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To make the case. This chat control age verification, all this stuff, it's a very bad idea. And I don't want to say like there are real threats to children online. It's not that we shouldn't take them seriously, but there are ways to do this. We talked about systems thinking before and systems design. There are ways to do this that balance the appropriate concerns that say, you know, can gate mature material behind age gates that don't reveal who you are, right? And once you build a system that essentially abolishes anonymity online, how long before that system? I mean, it's Chekhov's gun. How long before somebody comes along to use, if it's built, somebody's going to use it eventually for purposes that it wasn't designed for, how long until China says, hey, identify all the dissidents for me, right? Who are using this because they have to use their ID for everything on the internet.”
2026-07-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Proton’s CTO: No company is going to jail for you · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's, in my opinion, very misguided. And we are trying, and hopefully that at some point the fever breaks and this, you know, you cannot brand a back door with an American flag and say that only good people can use it. And it doesn't work like that or a EU flag or anything like that. And maybe this comes a little bit back. So there's the practical part. What do we do if this happens? What do we do if this happens? And at the end of the day, governments hold a lot of power on policy. And we, you know, you have to figure out how you can comply. If you can't comply, you leave, you do something else, right? But there are a lot of countries in the world, and I think we can ultimately do what we have to. The other part, just to, I guess, use your platform a bit.”
2026-07-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Proton’s CTO: No company is going to jail for you · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT