Is Privacy A Winnable Battle? | Andy Yen, Founder of Proton

AI, like social media, is intentionally designed to be addictive. In fact, you know, some of these AIs will even change the way they talk to you to cater to, you know, your personality and sort of what it senses is the is the sort of answer that that you want to hear. And that's a really scary thing. You know, you mentioned that AI maybe knows you better than some of your best friends. I would actually argue that in not so long from now, the AI could know you better than even you yourself. Oh my god. A lot a lot of us humans are not so self aware about who we are. Right? AI will actually be able to exploit the weaknesses of your personality that even you are not aware of in order to compel you to keep using it it and, you know, do what it wants. Welcome to Bankless, where we explore the frontier of digital privacy. This is Ryan Sean Adams. It's just me here today, so I am here to help you become more thankless. The question, is privacy a winnable battle? This is a very important conversation between myself and Andy Yen. Andy is the CEO of Proton. They are the makers of ProtonMail. I'm sure you've heard of it. Few things we discuss solving privacy in AI, how tech companies are screwing us, EU chat control legislation, Encryption as a civil liberty. His views on crypto. Also, I think my favorite part of this episode is that it comes with a little bit of homework. There's some level ups. And I genuinely want you to consider the homework. I want you to consider leveling up your privacy in 2026, like make it a project. Because going bankless is about freedom, and you lose your freedom when you lose your privacy. I think a number of factors have accelerated this, most notably AI coming on the scene. And I want you to accept for a minute the framing of this episode as we get into it. What if your AI chatbot isn't your friend? What if it's a sycophantic super genius designed by a company to trick you into feeding it more data and then using that data to gain more leverage over you. Even if that's a little bit true, don't you think it's concerning? There are ways to opt out, and we explore them in today's episode. Let's get right to it. So Bankless Nation, there is a confluence of things happening in the world right now. There was a Coinbase data breach earlier this year that leaked customer email address information, phone number information. I know the crypto industry has been hit with, in real life attacks on crypto people and particularly those who haven't been able to keep their information private. We live in a world of AI tools. We don't know what they're doing with the data. Like, what is ChatGPT doing with the data? I …