#339 Eamonn Maguire: Your Child Has a Data Profile Before They're Born

What if your child already has a data profile, and they haven't even been born yet?

In this episode of Eye on AI, Craig Smith sits down with Eamonn Maguire, Director of Engineering for AI and ML at Proton, to explore one of the most urgent and underappreciated questions in the age of AI: who owns your data, who is building a profile on you, and what can actually be done about it?

Eamonn brings a rare combination of depth and range to this conversation. With a PhD from Oxford, a postdoc at CERN, and years at Facebook engineering ML systems to detect internal and external threats, he now leads Proton's AI efforts, including Lumo, their end-to-end encrypted alternative to ChatGPT. He makes a compelling case that the surveillance economy is not just a privacy problem but a behavioral one, where the systems profiling you are not only observing who you are but actively shaping who you become.

We get into how just three data points are enough for advertisers to infer your age, political leanings, religion, and spending habits. We discuss why trusting mainstream AI platforms with sensitive data is a structural problem, not just a policy one, and why the AI labs with the best models got there by acquiring the most data, often with little regard for copyright law. Eamonn also breaks down the difference between truly open models and open washing, and explains how Proton builds AI that is genuinely private by design, with local indexing, encrypted memory, and user-controlled data sharing.

Then there is Born Private, Proton's initiative to give children a private digital identity from birth. It sounds simple on the surface, but the conversation it opens up is anything but. Data collection on your child begins before they are born, the moment a parent emails a gynecologist or a fertility clinic. Eamonn argues that until we start thinking about privacy the way we think about other rights, from the very beginning, the surveillance machine will always have a head start.

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Timestamp:

(00:00) Introduction and Meet Eamonn Maguire

(00:38) From Bioinformatics to CERN to Facebook: Eamonn's Career Arc

(05:23) How Proton Started in the CERN Cafeteria

(09:23) What Mainstream AI Platforms Actually Do With Your Data

(13:00) Copyright, Training Data, and Why Big Labs Can't Be Trusted

(15:10) Open Models vs Open Washing: What Truly Open AI Looks Like

(24:22) How Lumo Works: Encrypted Memory and No Data Leakage

(31:18) Born Private: Reserving a Private Email Address at Birth

(33:00) How Data Profiling Starts Before Your Child Is Born

(34:26) How Three Data Points Become a Complete Profile

(39:07) Molly Russell and the Consequences of Algorithmic Profiling

(53:55) The Full Proton Ecosystem: Mail, VPN, Drive, Lumo, and Workspace