Proton Calendar, which claims to be the “only in the world”calendar that uses end-to-end encryption and cryptographic verification, has arrived on iOS, providing those looking for a more secure work suite with an alternative to Google, Apple and the like.
Proton Calendar is touted as offering encryption for all event details, as well as “high performance elliptic curve cryptography (ECC Curve25519)”to block it. According to Proton, the web app version of Proton Calendar is open source, while the mobile app code is as follows. Proton also notes that it will never know who you invited to an event and allows you to invite people outside of the Proton ecosystem by allowing people to “cryptographically verify that you invited them.”
Andy Yen, CEO of Proton, said in an interview with Wired in May that calendars are an “extremely sensitive”record of your life and that protecting them is essential. Encryption protects your calendar data from government requests, data leaks, or “changes in your cloud provider’s business model.”
For its part, Google, the 800-pound calendar data sync gorilla, says Google calendar data is “encrypted in transit and at rest”using “strict industry standards and practices.”But Google has your name, email address, and phone number, and Calendar “uses the data to improve your experience”and stores “some location information,”searches, and other activity. Apple’s iCloud security/privacy policy is broader and not easily broken down into individual applications, but is similar to encryption. (Currently, the author was unable to provide a summary-friendly policy for personal Outlook accounts.)
So Proton offers a much simpler step: your data is always encrypted and not used to connect other (often ad-driven) services or, as is often the case, to process a bunch of user data.
Bringing the calendar app to iOS is part of Proton’s broader drive to position its suite of services — email, calendar, file storage, and VPN — as a security-conscious and privacy-conscious alternative to the free (or shareware) ecosystems run by the biggest tech companies. firms. You pay for all but the most basic services and receive services designed to protect your work and communications. Proton services are not as feature-rich as the better-known packages from Google, Apple, or corporate firms, but they are under active development.
Proton advertises its servers and user data as being protected by “Swiss data privacy laws,”which returned somewhat to the company last year. Proton (then known as ProtonMail) stated that by default it did not “keep any logs of IP addresses that might be associated with your anonymous email account”. Following the Swiss injunction, Proton was forced to store IP address logs in an account under investigation, removed the logging language from its policy, and pointed to Tor as a way to more anonymously access Proton.
Proton also urged regulators to loosen Apple’s control of its App Store in 2020 along with other firms such as Spotify, Telegram, Basecamp’s Hey, and others.