ProtonMail’s encrypted Google Calendar rival makes ditching Gmail a bit less daunting

ProtonMail has launched an encrypted Google Calendar alternative for beta users, making the idea of ditching Google’s Gmail a bit less daunting. 

ProtonCalendar is an end-to-end encrypted desktop app. The title, description, location and participants of every event you schedule are encrypted before they reach ProtonMail’s servers, meaning that not even the provider can access the personal data that may be hidden in your events.

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In its current form, ProtonCalendar allows users to create and delete events, set reminders and set events to repeat daily, weekly or monthly, with more features scheduled to arrive between the beta and the app’s public release in 2020.

These include a share calendar feature, an option to sync your ProtonMail inbox with your ProtonCalendar and iOS and Android apps for the calendar.

The launch comes after a rough end of the year for rival Google’s calendar app, during which many users found their calendars spammed with events from third party groups sneakily targeting email inboxes.

That, plus the fact that Google routinely looks through the information in your inbox and calendar − yes, that includes the content of emails − might have made you consider alternatives.

ProtonMail called the tech giant out in its announcement of ProtonCalendar.

“We believe everyone has the right to plan dinner with friends without announcing to Google who will attend,” the Proton Team wrote in a blog post.

“For that reason, once ProtonCalendar is publicly released, a basic version will be available to all ProtonMail users (including Free users) while paid Proton users will benefit from additional functionality.”

ProtonCalendar is available in beta for paying ProtonMail users now, though the company plans to roll out the app to free users within the year once the beta is complete. ProtonMail users with paid plans can find the calendar on the sidebar in ProtonMail’s Version 4.0 beta.