November 21, 2017

Geneva, Switzerland

Starting today, the new contacts manager is available to all of ProtonMail’s 5 million users around the world.

The development and launch of this feature was driven by the feedback that the company received from many of its users in the investigative journalism space. “Last year, we had the unique opportunity to meet with many of our users in the field at the Second Asian Investigative Journalism Conference in Kathmandu, Nepal, and one message that we heard over and over again was the need for better ways to protect sources,” says ProtonMail co-founder Dr. Andy Yen, “the new encrypted contacts manager today is the result of over one year of research and development into how we can best meet the needs of the thousands of activists, journalists, and dissidents who rely on ProtonMail to protect their privacy.”

In addition to protecting sensitive contact details with zero-access encryption (meaning that ProtonMail itself cannot decrypt the data, and cannot reveal the private contact details to third parties), ProtonMail’s new contact manager also utilizes digital signatures to verify the integrity of contacts data. This provides a cryptographic guarantee that nobody (not even ProtonMail), has tampered with the contacts data.

“Combining encryption with digital signatures provides powerful protection that guarantees not only the privacy, but also the authenticity of the contacts saved in ProtonMail, and reduces the need to trust ProtonMail, as even we cannot access or change this information without your knowledge,” says Dr. Yen. In line with standard company practice, the software behind ProtonMail’s encrypted contacts manager is fully open source.

For more details about ProtonMail’s encrypted contacts manager, please refer to our launch blog post here: https://protonmail.com/blog/encrypted-contacts-manager/

ProtonMail’s media kit can be found here: https://protonmail.com/media-kit

About ProtonMail

ProtonMail is headquartered in Geneva, Switzerland, near CERN (the European Organization for Nuclear Research) where the founding team met in 2013. Every day, the ProtonMail team, brought together by a shared vision of protecting civil liberties, works to advance Internet security and privacy. Since its inception, ProtonMail’s infrastructure has been located exclusively in Switzerland, under the protection of some of the world’s strongest privacy laws.

Media inquiries: media@protonmail.ch