A new version of Proton’s privacy-centered chatbot is here

Proton—the company behind the encrypted email service Proton Mail—is launching an updated version of its AI chatbot, Lumo. This tool is built specifically to interact with your data without breaking the privacy you expect from their other services, and this new release adds a wider range of capabilities to the assistant, making it more flexible for daily requests.

When you interact with a typical AI, it often works by sending your prompts to a central server where the company collects your conversations to improve its software. This improvement process is what engineers call "fine-tuning"—a method of taking an existing model and subtly adjusting it by feeding it more data, which allows the AI to learn patterns and produce better results over time. If a company uses your personal chats for this, your private information effectively becomes part of the system's foundation. Proton’s approach is different: it uses the software to generate answers without feeding your specific inputs back into the system's permanent knowledge base. By keeping your data siloed, they ensure your personal details stay yours rather than being absorbed into the company's shared repository of information.

The arrival of a more capable private chatbot signals that we are moving past the era where you must choose between "useful AI" and "your personal privacy." For most of the last two years, using an AI meant sacrificing some control over your information in exchange for convenience. As companies like Proton grow their offerings, they are challenging the standard model where your data is the hidden cost of admission. The open question now is whether the convenience of smarter AI will always require a trade-off, or if we can finally have an intelligent assistant that stays entirely on our side of the screen.