Why Backdoors Always Fail

AI is becoming the most powerful surveillance machine ever built and most people are feeding it their deepest secrets without realizing who can read them. Proton founder Andy Yen joins Bankless to explain how Big Tech captures your identity, why AI chat logs are a privacy disaster waiting to happen, and what a self-sovereign, user-aligned future could look like.
We explore how AI models profile you, why subscription business models don’t guarantee privacy, how Proton built Lumo without retaining user data, and why encrypted email remains the cornerstone of your digital identity. Andy also breaks down EU “chat control,” Apple’s privacy-washing, the crisis of trust in crypto, and the practical steps anyone can take today to reclaim their digital freedom.

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TIMESTAMPS

0:00 Intro
2:18 Why Privacy Matters More Than Ever
3:24 How Screwed Are We? Andy’s 1–10 Privacy Score
5:43 Who Can Read Your AI Chats?
12:22 Worst-Case Scenarios: AI Breaches & Behavioral Profiles
15:08 AI Knows You Better Than You Know Yourself
16:55 Privacy as a Digital Civil Liberty
20:26 Can Big Tech Ever Offer Real Privacy?
26:28 Why Lumo AI Can Be Private (and Big Tech Won’t Copy It)
31:08 What Lumo Runs On & How It Competes With Frontier Models
35:45 The Case for a Self-Sovereign AI
38:46 How Proton’s Foundation Model Really Works
45:47 Can Private AI Be Sustainable?
49:47 The Full Proton Privacy Stack
54:59 The Messy State of Encrypted Chat Apps
58:49 Browsers, Search, and the Dark Patterns of AI Integration
1:02:53 Are iPhones Actually Private?
1:12:42 The Fight Over Encryption: EU Chat Control & Beyond
1:26:08 “A Backdoor for the Good Guys” — Why It Can’t Work
1:29:42 Financial Privacy = Freedom
1:32:58 Crypto’s Reputation Problem
1:39:24 Practical Privacy: The One High-Leverage Step
1:45:15 Two Futures: One Dark, One Bright

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RESOURCES

Andy Yen
https://x.com/andyyen

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Not financial or tax advice. See our investment disclosures here:
https://www.bankless.com/disclosures