From intelligence agency dragnets, to data broker profiling; from the Sony email hacks to hundreds of thousands of credit card details being sold on the Dark Web, recent years have increasingly demonstrated data privacy is everyone's concern.

Yet encryption systems have traditionally been designed by, and for, a tiny, tech-literate niche. The result is that even the threat of personal data piracy has proved largely insufficient to convince the average user to grapple with the administration of public and private keys or the comparative advantages of competing protocols. If data privacy solutions are to play a larger part in our future, more user-friendly design needs to be part of that picture. WIRED and HP reveal ten re-inventors working to bring privacy to the people.

Andy Yen (above)

Co-founder and CEO, ProtonMail

With seven years experience running distributed computing systems for the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (better known as CERN), where the Large Hadron Collider generates 25 petabytes of information a year, Andy Yen knows how to handle data. But when former NSA contractor, Edward Snowden revealed the extent of the intelligence agency's wiretapping in 2013, Yen became concerned most of the public didn't know how to handle their own.

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His solution, launched with two other CERN colleagues in May 2014, wraps open source end-to-end encryption in a simple webmail interface, designed to be easy enough for anyone to use; easy enough to see adoption of ProtonMail by over a million users worldwide.

In addition to the cryptographic protection, all data sent through ProtonMail is physically protected by a heavily guarded bunker, buried beneath 1,000 metres of granite, and legally protected by Switzerland's extremely strong privacy laws.

Phil Zimmerman

Co-founder, Silent Circle

Passionate about data privacy before Snowden made it topical, Phil Zimmerman created the Pretty Good Privacy (PGP) encryption program in 1991, then made it freely available for download. PGP quickly spread internationally, becoming the most widely-used email encryption software, but its distribution outside the United States saw Zimmerman subjected to a three-year investigation for arms trafficking, under legislation that – at the time – categorised its strong encryption as a munition.

Undeterred, in 2012 he co-founded Swiss secure communications firm, Silent Circle. In addition to the SilentPhone app for encrypted voice, video, and text communications, the company has launched a secure physical smartphone and tablet, which includes chip specially developed with Qualcomm to securely partition their device into multiple independent spaces. This keeps enterprise data separate from personal communications.

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Vitalik Buterin

Creator, Ethereum

Earlier this year the total trading volume across bitcoin exchanges hit just shy of a quarter of a billion dollars, but it's not just abstract value being traded. Everything from diamonds and fashion to car and house sharing services can be smart tagged and secured on the blockchain's distributed ledger. Underpinning this is Vitalik Buterin's Ethereum, a distributed computing platform built on top of the blockchain, which supports the creation of self-enforcing peer-to-peer contracts. These contracts allow for the creation of secure autonomous organisations, with no need for either a central executive or external regulator.

The first such decentralised autonomous organisation to be created, a venture capital fund called The DAO, raised $150 million (£120 million) through the sale of Ethereum tokens (called Ether) each of which allows the holder one vote on any decisions the organisation must make.

Establishing a new form of corporate governance is no smooth sailing, however. In June 2016, hackers exploited a vulnerability in the DAO's code to siphon a third of the organisation's funds into a subsidiary account. The situation was resolved a month later, following extended debate and a vote by the DAO's shareholders in favour of a hard fork with the creation of a new blockchain, which reverted to the state prior to the attack.

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Bart Preneel (above)

Professor of Cryptography, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven

The world's oldest Catholic university may seem a strange place to find the frontiers of cryptography. Yet there, in a building nestled amid the woods outside the medieval town of Leuven, Flanders, you'll find Bart Preneel and his Computer Security and Industrial Cryptography Group (COSIC). Over the past 15 years the group has grown into one of the leading research centres for data encryption, with Preneel becoming an outspoken voice for the need to support a citizen's right to privacy, against governmental intelligence services' need for information.

In 2001 the group created the cypher selected for use as the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES), now the most widely used encryption method in the world. In addition to creating stronger cyphers, Preneel also spends much of his time showing companies and governments how theirs can be broken.

Luis Iván Cuende (above)

Founder and CEO, Stampery

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Humans may lie, but numbers don't. Which is why Spanish entrepreneur, Luis Iván Cuende wants to replace trust with mathematical formulae. Cuende's platform, Stampery, which raised $600,000 last November, allows any document or artwork to be recorded on the blockchain to provide decentralised proof of authenticity, ownership, integrity and point of creation - without the time or economic costs of physically printed documents and a visit to a human notary. Users simply drag the file to a folder or email it to a personal account and Stampery takes care of the rest.

Pavlov Durov

Founder and CEO, Telegram

They used to call Pavlov Durov 'Russia's Mark Zuckerberg,' for his role as founder of the country's largest social network, VKonkate. Then Durov fled Russia, following the loss of control of VKonkate to Kremlin-backed investors, and from there his trajectory diverged sharply from that of his Californian counterpart.

As Facebook increasingly reached further into the personal data of its users, Durov, with personal experience of the power of the surveillance state, placed himself firmly on the side of the privacy advocates. In 2013 he launched the encrypted messaging app, Telegram. In addition to perfect forward secrecy - ensuring key compromise won't reveal the content of previous communications - Telegram supports self-destructing messages and public key fingerprint verification.

The timing of its launch couldn't have been better, coming just after the Snowden leaks drove increased public interest in data privacy, which saw Telegram's monthly active users hit 100 million earlier this year.

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Susanne Tarkowski Tempelhof (above)

Founder and CEO, Bitnation

Seven years working as a public relations contractor to the US military in Libya and Afghanistan, assisting in both the building and overthrowing of governments left Amsterdam-based Susanne Tarkowski Tempelhof with a deep distrust of centralised authority and a desire to support alternative, autonomous communities. In blockchain she found the solution, a platform with the potential to secure the data not only of autonomous countries, but entire non-geographical self-governing nations. Bitnation, founded in July 2014, supports everything from family contracts like wills and marriages to citizenship documentation through secure, unalterable blockchain records.

Since December 2014 Bitnation has helped powered Estonia's e-residency program, which allows anyone, anywhere in the world to benefit from the country's digital services and run a business under its jurisdiction. The first bitnation notorised contract: a livestreamed wedding between two nomadic Spanish citizens.

Joe McNamee

Executive Director, European Digital Rights

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Data privacy is as much an issue of policy as technology, but when public understanding of in is low, governments can find themselves with a worrying amount of leeway on the former. That's where Joe McNamee and Brussels-based advocacy group, European Digital Rights comes in. Formed from ten NGOs in June 2002 the group works to promote and protect digital civil rights from ongoing government encroachment.

Key campaigns have included opposition to the amount of passenger data stored by airlines, in favour of limits on a company's retention of customer's data, and against any compromise to the principle of net neutrality, which mandates all data transferred over the internet must be treated equally by the ISPs.

During the European Parliamentary elections of 2014, EDRi encouraged candidates to sign up to a 10-point Charter of Digital Rights, including commitments to defend data protection and unrestricted access to the Internet, alongside the promotion of online anonymity and encryption.

Jonathan Warren (above)

Creator, Bitmessage

No matter how secure your encryption protocol, any data sent through or stored on a single server is still vulnerable to government data requests and cryptanalysis. New York-based developer, Jonathan Warren's Bitmessage takes privacy to another level by eliminating the centralised server altogether to send communications through the decentralised peer-to-peer network of the blockchain. That not only prevents anyone from easily intercepting even an encrypted form of the message, it also makes the Bitmessage service much more difficult for nations to block access to, or for hackers to take down. While initial users were largely from China, US downloads quintupled following news of NSA snooping.

Leon Schumacher

Co-founder and CEO, pretty Easy privacy

It’s hard to change habits, and the way we communicate is so ingrained that even fears of NSA snooping, commercial data mining, and identity fraud have done little to draw people away from standard email and messaging services. Schumacher’s solution is to bring encryption to people where they are. Switzerland-based pretty Easy privacy is, as the name suggests, an easy message encryption and anonymisation solution that can be simply integrated with all communications providers – from Outlook to Whatsapp – through your desktop and on your smartphone.

While the pEp service is provided on a subscription basis, the encryption engine itself is available open source through the pEp Foundation, which supports free privacy and freedom of information software projects with funding generated by pEp’s commercial operations.

Learn more about how HP is helping to re-invent security.