We have to change the way we use the internet

We need to take our data back, step by step. We can do so by using software with built-in automatic encryption. No one needs to know the content of my emails, or when I go on my next holiday, or what I want to buy for my best friends' wedding. Instead, I want to give marketers a hard time. I don't want them to offer over-priced stuff to me because they know I might want it.

This is not the free internet we were looking for when we first started using it. Today we are at a point where revolting against the big data miners like Google and Facebook seems useless because they already have so much data. But we at Tutanota refuse to give in to this Orwellian state of the internet.

Security expert Bruce Schneier said in a blog post: "Encryption should be enabled for everything by default, not a feature you turn on only if you're doing something you consider worth protecting." If everybody uses encryption "the government can't tell the dissidents from the rest of the population. Every time you use encryption, you're protecting someone who needs to use it to stay alive." He concludes encryption is the most important privacy-preserving technology we have, and it is best suited to protect against mass surveillance. We at Tutanota couldn't agree more: Encryption needs to become mainstream.

Let's turn on encryption by default

Using pgp in Gmail, for instance, is possible. Unfortunately, this will not change the internet. Gmail still has over 90 per cent of your emails because not enough people care to do the extra steps necessary to set up and use pgp. And while Gmail once promised to become end-to-end encrypted, this project is now dead. This is why we at Tutanota have decided to build an encrypted mailbox that puts you in charge of your data. While in addition to easy-to-use end-to-end encryption, you can still send normal emails. Even those are encrypted for you before being stored on the servers. But this is just a first step. We want to add pgp-support to increase the number of end-to-end encrypted emails. We want to add a free encrypted calendar, encrypted cloud storage, basically we want you to become independent of today's data miners.

We want everybody to be able to share their thoughts and ideas, provocative or bland, in a way that no one can read along.

We believe that we are obliged to protect our privacy and our freedom of speech in order to keep up the values of our free democracies. The opposite - all-round surveillance - is just too devastating. Join our free secure mail service, even if you have nothing to hide. Together we can make a change and stop our society from being monitored 24/7, step by step.