As a Swiss company, ProtonMail cannot be compelled to engage in bulk surveillance on behalf of US intelligence agencies, for example.
In the SPTT, the obligation to provide the technical means for lawful interception is imposed only on Internet access providers, so ProtonMail, as a mere Internet application provider, is completely exempt from the SPTT’s scope of application. In Switzerland, the laws governing electronic communications are set out in the Swiss Federal Act on the Surveillance of Postal and Telecommunications Traffic (SPTT), last revised in 2012. Nearly every country in the world has laws governing lawful interception of electronic communications. Furthermore, Switzerland applies a very different set of (stricter) privacy laws since it is outside of US and EU jurisdiction. ProtonMail is hosted in a former military command center deep inside the Swiss Alps, thus providing maximum physical security for its clients’ data.
The young and successful tech company is headquartered in Switzerland for various reasons. The company’s vision is to build an internet that respects privacy and is secure against cyber-attacks. The team combines deep mathematical and technical knowledge from the world's top research institutions with expertise in end-to-end encryption. The founding team met at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research in Geneva, where Andy Yen, co-founder and CEO of Proton Technologies AG, was a researcher from 2009 to 2015. Its servers are located in Switzerland, outside of US and EU jurisdiction. In 2014, ProtonMail became the world’s first email service to make end-to-end encrypted emails accessible to anyone in the world at a click of a button, in contrast to other email providers such as Gmail and Hotmail.
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