Proton’s new privacy-first AI assistant encrypts all chats, retains no logs

Privateness-focused productiveness instruments maker Proton on Wednesday launched its AI assistant, referred to as Lumo, which it says prioritizes defending person knowledge.

The corporate says the chatbot retains no logs of your conversations, has end-to-end encryption for storing chats, and provides a ghost mode for conversations that disappear as quickly as you shut the window.

Out there by way of an online shopper, in addition to Android and iOS apps, Lumo doesn’t require you to have an account to make use of the chatbot and ask questions. You’ll be able to add information to have the chatbot reply questions on them, and when you’ve got a Proton Drive account, you may join it with Lumo to entry information saved within the cloud. Whereas the chatbot has entry to the online, it won’t discover you the newest outcomes for those who use it to look.

Proton appears intent on making it clear that its focus is on privateness. The corporate says Lumo relies on open-source fashions, and it’ll solely depend upon them for analysis and growth going ahead with out using person knowledge to coach its fashions. It additionally mentioned Lumo depends on zero-access encryption, an encryption methodology that different Proton merchandise additionally use, to let customers retailer their dialog historical past, which could be decrypted on the system.

All through its weblog put up about Lumo, Proton emphasised its European base, saying it offers the corporate a leg up over AI corporations based mostly within the U.S. and China in the case of privateness.

“Lumo relies upon open-source language fashions and operates from Proton’s European datacenters. This provides you a lot larger transparency into the way in which Lumo works than some other main AI assistant. Not like Apple Intelligence and others, Lumo is just not a partnership with OpenAI or different American or Chinese language AI corporations, and your queries are by no means despatched to any third events,” Proton mentioned.

This isn’t Proton’s first foray into the fast-developing AI instruments area: Final yr, it rolled out an AI-powered writing assistant for its Mail product that additionally runs on the person’s system.