This New Service Hopes to Stop Companies That Spy on Your Events

ProtonMail just released a new encrypted calendar feature that could help keep your events, reminders and contacts away from prying eyes.

If you aren’t familiar, ProtonMail is a service famous for its end-to-end encrypted email. The company also offers VPN services. And now, for paid ProtonMail users, it also has a secure calendar appropriately called ProtonCalendar.

“For the longest time, to easily organize these events, you had to let large corporations monitor these special moments,” the company wrote in a blog post. “A calendar is more than just a tool. It’s a record of the moments that make up your life.”

Every detail of an event is encrypted before it leaves your computer, the company notes. That includes title, description, location and participants. And it means that no third-party can see any of that data (including ProtonMail itself).

Whether big data harvesters like Google spy on your Calendar events is up for debate. But it’s no secret that the company, and others like it, have snooped on sensitive user data in the past. Google only stopped scanning Gmail inboxes back in 2017, for example.

The level of encryption, as well as ProtonMail’s other security and anti-spam features, could also help cut down on the spammy calendar invites that have plagued other services like Gmail and iCloud.

As mentioned earlier, the calendar is currently in beta testing for paid users, but ProtonMail said that it hopes to bring the feature to all users eventually. It’s available only via web interface for now, but an iOS and Android app are in the works for a 2020 release.

It’s worth noting that ProtonMail is a good alternative to Google services for the privacy-conscious. But if you use Apple’s native Calendar, you’re covered by similar levels of security.

According to Apple’s iCloud security overview documentation, all Calendar data is encrypted with 128-bit AES encryption both on-server and in transit.