Your favorite privacy-focused service is joining the AI bandwagon. Proton Mail now features an AI writing assistant called Scribe. It promises to help you write and revise emails without collecting your personal data.
Scribe works like any other AI writing assistant. Give it a prompt, and it generates text. Ask it to revise or proof-read your email draft, and it will do so.
Similar tools are built into Gmail and Outlook. The thing that makes Scribe special is that it doesn’t collect or transmit data. It runs locally on your device and is bound by end-to-end encryption, meaning that interactions with Scribe will never be seen by Proton or any other companies (barring some catastrophic security failure, of course).
There’s also an option to access Scribe through a “secure, no logs-server.” This option is probably intended for users who log into Proton mail from a work computer or a public workstation. (The server-based approach may also be required when using Proton Mail in a web browser—Proton hasn’t clarified this particular point).
“Proton Scribe is not trained on data from users’ inboxes, and it would be impossible for it to do so due to Proton’s zero-access encryption. Proton has a policy of never retaining any data that users type into Proton Scribe. It is built, operated and run by Proton, meaning that no data is shared with any third parties, and there is no “partnership” with outside firms like OpenAI. Proton Scribe has been developed on top of open-source models and is itself open-source, allowing for independent privacy and security audits to take place.”
And, to my relief, Proton is keen on avoiding some of the less-than-obvious problems that often come with AI integration. Customers who want to use Scribe do not need to agree to a new privacy policy, for example, and third parties like OpenAI are not affiliated with this project in any way. The AI is based on open-source models and is itself open-source.
I assume that a lot of Proton’s customers will disable Scribe (which is allowed, by the way). Generative AI has ushered in a new era of data collection that many people see as a threat to personal privacy, so some pushback makes sense.
That said, the whole sales pitch behind Proton is that it offers Google-like services without compromising user privacy. If you already trust Proton’s email, password management, or cloud storage services, I’m not sure why you’d be afraid of Scribe.
Proton Scribe is currently limited to Business, Visionary, and Lifetime subscribers. The AI only works in Proton Mail, though I assume that it’ll roll out to Proton Docs at some point in the future, for better or worse.
Source: Proton
