ProtonMail

This is a good question. Essentially, unless you are located on a ship 100 km offshore, you will have to fall under the jurisdiction of some country and must follow the laws of that country. Almost all countries require companies to assist in some manner in criminal investigations, and Switzerland is no exception.

This is the reason why the choice of Switzerland matters. In Switzerland, we have intentionally picked a jurisdiction where we believe there is a strong cultural and institutional respect for privacy, which extends both to the laws and the behavior of the courts and law enforcement. This means that in the example that you bring up with a journalists or activist, it is rather difficult to get a Swiss court to consider such a person to be a criminal.

In all cases, our legal team also reviews all requests and will also fight certain requests that we believe may be improper. In the event that a court order does get approved, we are also quite limited in what we can provide given our policy of collecting as little user information as possible, and using zero access encryption for all emails stored on our servers. Full details about what we can provide can be found in our privacy policy: https://protonmail.com/privacy-policy

This is a tough question. The base Android OS is open source, but most Android devices ship with quite a bit of proprietary software, and the software can also be changed via automatic updates. It really comes down to whether or not you trust the device vendor. I do use Android myself, and I wish I could trust it more than I currently do.

Back in 2014, it was rather surprising to a lot of people. Compared to today, the idea of doing a startup (particularly in Europe), or going into tech, wasn't as "cool" as it is today. The funny thing though is that a lot of the physicists I knew who looked at it as an odd career choice back in 2014 have since then ended up going into tech themselves, so in that way, we were ahead of the curve.

I do sometimes miss the more relaxed environment of scientific research, where deadlines are more flexible. After all, the laws of physics aren't going to change if you are a day late in running your experiment.

This is a good question, and one that we have thought about quite a bit. I believe that the best way to create alignment between a company and its users is the long term alignment of incentives.

Facebook and Google are two classical examples where this alignment doesn't quite exist. Google users are not Google's main customer, but rather, the "product" they are selling to their real customers, which are advertisers.

Proton's configuration is different, in that the only reason we exist is because we have a focus on privacy that Google cannot easily replicate because of differences in business model. Violating user privacy would therefore also destroy the company's core business. While this is not a 100% guarantee for the future, I think it creates a strong financial incentive for future management to retain the core values even if the founding team were somehow to out of the picture (and no, we're not planning on going anywhere).

I'm using the stock OS, with as few customizations/add-ons as possible.