I Tried Out Proton’s New Privacy-Focused AI Chatbot to See If It’s Better Than ChatGPT
We’ve been covering Proton’s privacy-focused products for a while now, including cloud storage , VPN , and a comprehensive email service. Proton’s latest offering is its AI chatbot Lumo. Like everything else Proton makes, it’s built with user privacy in mind.
Lumo is available on the web , Android , and iOS , and you can get started for free — you don’t even need a Proton account. As you’d expect, there’s a Pro plan available for $12.99 per month, which brings features like full chat history, more advanced AI models, and higher chat usage and file size metrics. Unfortunately, the Pro plan isn’t included with Proton’s other plans — it’s a separate one.
Overall, Proton’s previous apps and services have been impressive. Should you look at Lumo to avoid the data collection policies of Google, OpenAI, and others? Or should you stick with one of the big AI players?
What makes Lumo different?
Read the Lumo launch post on Proton’s blog, and you’ll see that the company is working hard to make its AI assistant stand out in terms of the minimal amount of data it stores. Of course, the bot does require data storage to function, and you can save your chats for later use if you want.
First, your chats are not used to train the AI models that power Lumo. This is an option that can be enabled in bots like ChatGPT and Gemini, and is a benefit of Apple Intelligence. Other AIs are less transparent about this, so it’s nice to see Proton mention it up front.
Additionally, your chats are protected by zero-access encryption, meaning no one can snoop on what you’re reading — not law enforcement, not government agencies, not even Proton employees. This is a clear advantage over other AI platforms, although companies like Google and OpenAI claim that there are strict legal procedures and strict guidelines in place to ensure the privacy of your saved chats. However, like other AIs using LLM, Lumo can’t provide full end-to-end encryption, as Proton explains here .
It’s hard to rank Lumo against other services, since a lot depends on whether you save or delete your chats as you use them. To complicate matters, OpenAI is currently forced to store a significant portion of all user chats (even deleted ones) as part of an ongoing lawsuit with the New York Times. Clearly, Proton is taking this issue more seriously than anyone else at the moment.
Moreover, Lumo is powered by open-source AI models, which should provide greater transparency. The service is not tied to any third-party partnerships, so you can be sure that the policies and protections implemented by Proton will not be compromised due to ties to other companies.
You can readmore about Lumo’s privacy on Proton’s website, including information about the large language models (LLM) used by the chatbot. As always with Proton, it’s worth remembering that the company operates out of Europe, meaning it’s not subject to the same surveillance and data retention policies as the US.
Lumo vs ChatGPT
ChatGPT has been around for much longer than Lumo, and has many more billions of dollars invested in it. So ChatGPT is likely to outperform Proton’s newcomer. The more interesting question is whether Lumo can get close enough to ChatGPT to make it attractive, given its privacy-focused approach.
For quick and simple queries, Lumo works great: I tried searching for sports scores, tech buying advice, document summaries, and movie recommendations, and the chatbot mostly gave useful and accurate answers. Its data does occasionally become out of date, but you can fix that by turning on the web search feature .
Lumo can code and translate, although I didn’t test these features very thoroughly since I’m neither a linguist nor a programmer. The AI is fast, most queries are answered quickly, and all of this is presented in a polished, easy-to-understand user interface. What’s more, I was able to send quite a few queries and messages before I hit any usage limits.
When compared directly to ChatGPT, it’s not quite perfect: Lumo’s responses are more generic and formulaic, the structure of the responses is not as well-developed, and the feedback is not as detailed. It’s immediately obvious that it’s built on older AI models, and this becomes even more important when moving to more advanced suggestions. Lumo also doesn’t offer advanced features like deep analysis or image generation.
I like the look and feel of Lumo, and the integration with Proton Drive is a nice touch. Even if something like Gemini could connect to all of Google’s apps, that’s not necessarily what you want. There’s always a tradeoff between how much access you’re willing to give an AI chatbot to your apps and files, and what you want it to do with them.
Given the prevalence of AI, Proton clearly needs a chatbot to handle user queries, and its focus on privacy and security is commendable. It’s definitely a good option if you’re already a Proton user or data protection is a top priority for you. However, to get the best AI models and most features, you’ll need to look elsewhere, and accept some limitations on how your data is used.
Disclosure: Lifehacker’s parent company, Ziff Davis, filed a lawsuit against OpenAI in April, alleging that it infringed Ziff Davis’ copyrights in the training and operation of its AI systems.