Proton

Proton builds encrypted email, VPN, cloud storage, and password management tools. The Swiss company was founded by scientists who met at CERN, runs everything as open source with independent audits, and pitches itself as the privacy-first alternative to Google’s suite. Proton Mail keeps your inbox out of reach of ad platforms, and Proton VPN is one of the better options for genuine privacy rather than the kind that just shifts your data to a different harvester. If you’re browsing adult content or using dating apps, this is the sort of toolkit worth knowing about. As we’ve laid out in our honest guide to adult content privacy, incognito mode hides nothing from your ISP, and a VPN matters more than ever now that age verification laws are pushing privacy-conscious users toward workarounds. Whether those workarounds hold up is another question, since regulators keep trying to legislate against them and platform blocks have a way of springing leaks, as the French government admitted when Pornhub pulled out.