#339 Eamonn Maguire: Your Child Has a Data Profile Before They're Born

What It Covers

Eamonn Maguire, Head of AI at Proton, explains how data profiles are built on individuals before birth through email metadata and behavioral tracking, and how Proton's Born Private initiative and encrypted ecosystem — including Lumo AI, ProtonMail, and Proton Workspace — aim to counter this surveillance infrastructure.

Key Questions Answered

• •Data profile construction: Companies like Google build behavioral profiles from as few as three data points — an Instagram signup, a newsletter subscription, and a search query — then use ad click patterns to fill profile gaps, inferring religion, politics, and income without users ever directly disclosing that information. Treat every signup as a data disclosure.
• •AI training data and trust: Free users on platforms like ChatGPT default to contributing their data for model training. Enterprise contracts offer opt-outs, but access remains. Anthropic faced a $1.5 billion lawsuit for purchasing and scanning thousands of books to extract training data. Users should assume any unencrypted input to a proprietary model is potentially retained.
• •Open model evaluation: Truly open AI models — including NVIDIA's Nematron series (20B, 120B, and upcoming 500B parameter versions), Allen Institute's OLMo, and Switzerland's Apertus — publish training data sources alongside weights and code. Proton's Lumo deploys these models on private infrastructure, rotating to frontier-performing options like Qwen and GLM as benchmarks shift.
• •Born Private and pre-birth data exposure: A child's data profile begins accumulating before birth when parents email fertility clinics or gynecologists through Gmail, triggering ad targeting for pediatricians and hospitals. Proton's Born Private program lets parents reserve a ProtonMail address for a child at birth via a $1 symbolic donation, anchoring the child's digital identity in an encrypted system from day one.
• •Privacy-preserving AI context: Proton's Lumo implements local document indexing through its Projects feature, allowing enterprise teams to link encrypted Drive folders. At query time, relevant documents are retrieved locally and injected into the prompt context before being sent to the GPU — meaning Proton's servers never read the content, yet the model still receives full business context for accurate responses.