Proton is moving out of Switzerland. The world's safest privacy haven just cracked. For twenty years, "based in Switzerland" has been the strongest three words a privacy company could put on its homepage. Strong data protection law, outside the EU, outside the Five Eyes intelligence-sharing arrangement, famously indifferent to foreign subpoenas. It is the reason a generation of encrypted email and VPN services set up shop there. That reputation just took a serious hit. Proton - the company behind Proton Mail and Proton VPN, and probably the best-known privacy brand in the world - announced it is moving most of its physical infrastructure out of Switzerland. Not because business is bad. Because of a law that hasn't even been finalized yet. The short version * Proton is relocating most of its physical infrastructure out of Switzerland, starting with its Lumo AI product, which moves to Germany. * The trigger is a proposed revision of Switzerland's surveillance ordinance (VÜPF / OSCPT) that would require ID verification, six months of IP logs, and the ability to decrypt data on request. * The ordinance has not been finalized - the Swiss Federal Council has yet to decide. * The lesson for users: where a VPN is legally based, and what its government can compel, matters as much as the marketing on the website. What Switzerland is proposing. The law in question is a revision of Switzerland's ordinance on the surveillance of post and telecommunications - known by its Swiss abbreviations VÜPF, or OSCPT in French. It was introduced by the Swiss Federal Council and has been fought over by the country's technology sector ever since. What makes it alarming isn't one clause. It's the combination of three: * Mandatory identification - providers would have to verify who users are, using something like an ID document or a phone number. Anonymous sign-up effectively ends. * Data retention - providers, reportedly including services with as few as 5,000 users, would have to log IP addresses and keep them for six months. * Decryption on demand - providers would need the ability to decrypt data they themselves encrypted, when ordered to. That is a backdoor by another name. Each requirement on its own would be contentious. Together they describe a country where a privacy service is structurally impossible to run - which is precisely the argument the industry has been making. Worth being precise about This ordinance is not yet in force. As of mid-2026 the Swiss Federal Council had not finalized it, and the outcome is still genuinely uncertain. Proton is not reacting to a law that passed - it is reacting to the risk that it might, which tells you how seriously the industry takes it. What Proton actually did. Proton said it is moving most of its physical infrastructure out of Switzerland, citing the legal uncertainty around proposals it describes as an attempt to introduce mass surveillance. Its first product to move is Lumo, the company's AI assistant, whose infrastructure is relocating to Germany. The scale is the striking part. Proton framed the shift as an investment of more than €100 million into the EU, tied to building what it calls a sovereign "EuroStack" - European infrastructure for European services - with further facilities planned in Norway. Companies do not casually relocate that much infrastructure. They do it when they believe the alternative is worse. Proton's founder has argued publicly that the proposed rules would be illegal in both the EU and the United States, and has put the stakes in blunt terms: under the revision, the company says it would end up less confidential than the big American platforms people switch to Proton to avoid. Why this matters even if you've never used Proton. Most VPN marketing is a competition over feature lists - server counts, protocol names, streaming unblocks. This story is a reminder that the feature list is the easy part. The hard part is the legal environment a company operates in, because that determines what it can be forced to do regardless of what its privacy policy says. A no-logs policy is a promise about what a company chooses to store. A retention law is a rule about what it must store. When the two conflict, the law wins. That is the entire reason jurisdiction is worth caring about - and why a service quietly moving servers across a border is bigger news than another 10% off sale. The pattern across 2026 Switzerland is not an isolated case. The UK has debated restricting VPN access for under-18s, Australia now expects platforms to detect and block VPN use, and age-verification rules keep spreading. Different countries, same underlying instinct: treat the privacy tool as the problem. Where SoloFlight stands. SoloFlight'll be straightforward, because that's the whole point of an article like this. SoloFlight runs a strict zero-logs policy: SoloFlight do not store your browsing activity, connection timestamps, or originating IP addresses. Signing up needs an email address and nothing else - no government ID, no phone number, no face scan. Payments run through Stripe, so SoloFlight never see your card number. The honest version of the argument isn't "we are legally invincible." No provider anywhere can promise that. It's that the less a service collects, the less exists to hand over - under any government, under any future law. Data you never stored cannot be retained, leaked, subpoenaed, or sold. If you're re-evaluating your VPN after this week's news, the useful questions are in its guide to judging a VPN in 2026. And if you want the short version - encryption that doesn't depend on price, and a company that never asked who you are - that's below. Privacy that doesn't ask who you are. Every plan includes every feature. No tiers, no upsells, no renewal price hikes.

Private AI. 2026-07-30 It's buzzing currently - and rightfully so. AI assistants are very handy tools. Ncd Systems tested a few, and while there are some very good LLMs available on the internet, Ncd Systems has been looking for a solution that would preserve its own privacy at all costs. After having tested and read about it, Ncd Systems selected Proton and its Lumo offering as its go-to AI solution and this primarily for privacy concerns. A privacy policy shouldn't require a law degree to decipher. Proton's approach read's: if Ncd Systems can't explain plainly what Ncd Systems do with your data, Ncd Systems probably shouldn't be doing it. No training on your conversations. No selling data to third parties. Customer-first privacy policy as its backbone. Exactly what Ncd Systems has been looking for. Beyond the basics: what Lumo delivers. Beyond privacy, Lumo offers a suite of features designed for real-world workflows: * Projects - Dedicated encrypted workspaces where you bundle chats, files, and custom instructions for recurring tasks * Ghost Mode - Toggle to make entire chats disappear permanently once you close the session * Custom Lumos - Create specialized assistants for specific workflows (writing, code review, research, etc.) * Image capabilities - Generate, edit, and analyze images with zero-access encryption applied too * Persistent Memory - User-controlled feature where Lumo learns your preferences across sessions All of this happens within a zero-access encryption framework - meaning even Proton cannot read your chats or files. In Practice: capabilities that match expectations. In regards to capabilities, Lumo has been more than able to handle its requests (mainly IT based topics; Python, Flask, iptables, code and code security review, Ansible etc.). It's fast, responsive and handles complex queries/projects without skipping a beat. Ncd Systems did actually got ourselves a Lumo Plus subscription which helps at organizing projects while keeping chats history, which comes handy. Note that Ncd Systems did not test the image capabilities mentioned above as of yet. For transparency-seekers: Lumo runs on open-source language models including Nemo, OLMO, Qwen, and others - publicly documented at Proton's Security Model Integration that respects your encryption. Another extremely valuable feature is the possibility to integrate/share your own contents with Lumo and that right from your Proton Drive - Here again, you're in full control and the sole owner of any encryption keys at use. Files remain end-to-end encrypted; Lumo only sees what you explicitly share for a given query, then deletes them immediately after processing. Why this matters for IT professionals. For anyone handling sensitive data - whether proprietary code, client information, or infrastructure configs - the stakes are higher. A breach isn't just about personal privacy; it's about organizational liability, compliance requirements, and trust. Lumo supports GDPR/HIPAA compliance and holds ISO 27001 and SOC 2 certifications, assets clearly resonating for business deployments. You got it by now: Ncd Systems do recommend Proton Lumo for any privacy - sovereignty conscious entity. Whether you're an individual developer, a security-minded professional, or an organization evaluating AI tools, Lumo delivers the capabilities you may expect from an AI assistant however, without the privacy trade-offs the industry has normalized. And honestly, in 2026, that shouldn't be a luxury - it should be everyone's baseline.

Proton launches business continuity service to keep firms communicating through outages. 2026-07-15 15:07 Swiss encrypted communications provider Proton has launched a dedicated business continuity service, aimed at helping organisations keep email and video communications running when their primary IT infrastructure fails or is taken offline. The service is built around Proton Mail and Proton Meet, and is designed to give security and IT teams a pre-configured fallback they [...] Read the original article: Information security training Swiss privacy company Proton is urging European startups to rethink their cybersecurity approach after new research based on dark-web breach monitoring found that early-stage companies are increasingly targeted by cybercriminals, with significant consequences for innovation, data protection, and business continuity. The push comes as Proton launches its new initiative, "Build... Vulnerability assessment tool February 5, 2026