Proton Launches Lumo, a Privacy-Focused AI Chatbot

Proton, known best for the encrypted email service Proton Mail, has launched a new AI assistant called Lumo that prioritizes user privacy. While Lumo's capabilities—summarizing documents, writing code, drafting emails, analyzing uploaded files, and more—are similar to those seen in ordinary chatbots, Proton's platform is said to be uniquely focused on keeping people's data secure. It's the "privacy-first" brand's answer to larger technology firms' AI chatbots, which snap up users' data.

According to Proton, Lumo uses “zero-access” encryption, meaning only users have the key required to access their data; even Proton cannot view users' content. The company says it uses Transport Layer Security (TLS) to encrypt data transmission and asymmetrically encrypt user prompts, which means only Lumo GPU servers in Europe can decrypt these queries as required. In a blog post published Wednesday, Proton explained that even when Lumo checks files or links ...