Fearing your documents ended up feeding the ever-hungry robots that is AI today? Swiss company Proton AG (not to be confused with the domestic carmaker Proton) is launching a Google Docs equivalent that allows users to edit and share documents like you’d do with Google’s service.
Proton Docs: Google Docs, Sans AI
The unique selling point here is the privacy aspects of it, as Proton has a long history of privacy-focused products including Proton Mail, Proton VPN, and Proton Drive, which includes Proton Docs. The company says its word processor will keep files end-to-end encrypted at all times, so they can’t be used to train generative AI models – unless the user explicitly downloads the file and feeds it to the models. From a security perspective, this helps prevent data leaks in the event of breaches, which is especially important in this day and age.
However, as PCMag tested, Proton Docs still has some early-day wrinkles to sort out. Documents in .docx format (which is supported by all major word processors) has seen some conversion glitches, though the company promises fixes are on the way. Still, Proton is aiming big as the company says “everything that Google’s got is on our roadmap,” but it opted to go with supporting .docx first as “it’s the most commonly used format.”
Proton AG is based on Switzerland, where the privacy laws are some of the strictest on the planet. The company has also open-sourced its code, such as Proton Drive, for the public and audit firms to inspect and verify its claims.
Pokdepinion: Why isn’t end-to-end encryption the standard in Google Docs, again?
