The company behind encrypted email service Proton Mail has today launched a new freemium AI chatbot which promises that your chats will remain completely private.

Proton Lumo offers five protections it says aren’t matched by any of the existing mainstream AI services like ChatGPT and Gemini, and has even thrown shade at Apple Intelligence privacy …

Proton Lumo AI chatbot

Proton said it launched Lumo because the benefits of AI are too great to miss, but the privacy risks are too serious to ignore.

Whether we like it or not, AI is here to stay, but the current iterations of AI reflect a failure to learn from the past. That’s why we built Lumo — a private AI assistant that only works for you, not the other way around. With no logs kept and every chat encrypted, Lumo keeps your conversations confidential and your data fully under your control — never shared, sold, or stolen.

The company makes five privacy promises:

No logs Other AI companies keep a record of all your conversations on their servers, leaving this information vulnerable to data leaks or exploitation for profit. Lumo doesn’t keep any logs of your conversations server side, and any chats you save can only be decrypted on your device. Zero-access encryption Your chats are stored using our battle-tested zero-access encryption, so even we can’t read them, similar to other Proton services such as Proton Mail, Proton Drive, and Proton Pass. Our encryption is open source and trusted by over 100 million people to secure their data. No data sharing Big Tech companies share your data with third-party vendors, advertisers, and government agencies for online surveillance. Lumo’s no logs and encrypted architecture ensure we don’t have data to share, and our European home gives you the benefit of robust privacy protections, outside of US jurisdiction. Not used to train AI Unlike other AI services, Lumo doesn’t use your conversations or inputs to train the large language model. When this kind of training occurs, your personal data could end up being used to generate outputs for others’ conversations. Lumo won’t ever expose you to this risk, which is especially important for businesses working with confidential material. Open Lumo is based upon open-source language models and operates from Proton’s European datacenters. This gives you much greater transparency into the way Lumo works than any other major AI assistant.

Calls out Apple for AI partnerships

Apple Intelligence protects privacy in three ways.

First, as much AI processing as possible is done on-device. Second, when more processing is needed, the default fallback is to Apple’s own Private Cloud Compute (PCC) servers, which have “extraordinary” privacy protections.

Third, where the last resort of fallback to ChatGPT is needed, this never happens without your permission, and Apple’s agreement with OpenAI means that these sessions cannot log your requests nor use them for training.

But it’s that third area that Proton criticizes:

Unlike Apple Intelligence and others, Lumo is not a partnership with OpenAI or other American or Chinese AI companies, and your queries are never sent to any third parties.

Proton does not, however, include Apple Intelligence in its privacy comparison table.

You can try Lumo here. As with other chatbots, you get a certain amount of usage for free, but need a paid subscription for more extensive use.

9to5Mac’s Take

Proton’s criticism doesn’t make sense given the special terms which apply to ChatGPT when accessed via Apple Intelligence. Additionally, the part about queries being sent to third parties would be equally true if Apple partnered with Proton instead of OpenAI, so …

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