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ZDNET Highlights
- AI and Big Tech are destroying personal privacy.
- Proton’s encrypted devices are becoming increasingly attractive.
- Proton CEO Andy Yen is worried about a future filled with rogue agents.
As the popularity of AI continues to grow, privacy and security concerns surrounding the technology have risen, especially over the past year.
AI is now a common tool for cybercriminals, making it much easier for bad actors to steal your data. The technology also enables mass surveillance to be taken to new extremes. Despite being embraced by tech giants like Nvidia and Meta, AI agents like OpenClaw have continued to leak or delete sensitive information.
Also: Proton recently launched a Google Workspace alternative – and it’s fully encrypted
Earlier this month, I attended Semaphore World Economy in DC, where 500 CEOs joined with government leaders to discuss the state of global business, including the impacts of AI on security and privacy. Andy Yen, CEO of VPN and private digital services provider Proton, spoke on the topic; I sat down with Yen after his panel to discuss whether privacy can co-exist with AI, what its future looks like, and why he thinks Proton is well-positioned to succeed.
Privacy in the public consciousness
AI and privacy trade-offs go hand in hand: The thinking is that the more data AI tools have access to, the better they will perform, whether for enterprise or personal use. This directly pits implementation and efficacy against risk tolerance. Nevertheless, popularity has skyrocketed in the past two years, especially in sensitive use cases like health care.
Also: How to audit what ChatGPT knows about you – and reclaim your data privacy
Since Proton’s founding in 2014, long before AI use grew among everyday consumers, the company has offered users a privacy-first alternative to the tools of Big Tech like Google, Microsoft, and Meta. However, Yen does not think the rise of AI tools has popularized data privacy concerns among the public. In his view, the issue is a generational mismatch between privacy awareness and technology adoption.
“There are more people who really care about privacy, but are not tech-savvy enough and don’t know how to protect themselves,” he said. “Then there are certain types of middle-aged people – we’re really the worst off because we don’t have the attention to privacy that our parents had, yet we’re adopting this technology. So we’re more ignorant and more exposed.”
Yen is optimistic that education will solve this, he said.
Also: 5 Reasons You Should Be More Vigilant About Your Chatbot (And How to Fix Past Mistakes)
“The best way to protect someone is to teach them about the risks,” he said. “If the work of education is done correctly, everything else will follow naturally.”
However, beyond that solution, he hopes the lack of mass awareness is simply a matter of time.
“I think we need to take this in the context of long-term trends,” he said. “When we started Proton in 2014, maybe one in 10 (people) understood the business model of Google and Facebook. Today, it’s maybe 4 in 10, and when OpenAI started running ads and pushing bias suggestions for revenue, it was seen by more people – maybe 7 in 10.”
For now, Yen believes that despite apathy, the next generation is best prepared for the world being created by AI.
“Young people are the most aware – they know how Google makes money, how ads work, about algorithms, but they don’t care about it,” he said. “Given the choice between ignorance versus not caring, I prefer an audience that is aware and not caring, because you can get them to care.”
Also: This privacy-first chatbot is taking off — here’s why and how to try it
Duck.ai, a chatbot from private browser company DuckDuckGo, saw a surge in web traffic earlier this year. Despite not gaining an edge over industry leaders like ChatGPIT and Cloud, the spike echoes a trend Yen said he’s seeing at Proton, and gives him confidence that more people will eventually turn to privacy-first alternatives.
“Lumo is the fastest-growing product within Proton today,” Yen said of the company’s encrypted chatbot. “This kind of shows that people need AI; they use it day to day, it’s very much part of life today, but basically, no one trusts it. The ability to get the benefits of AI, but have your conversations guaranteed to remain private in the future, is quite powerful. As time goes on, more people want it.”
The biggest danger of AI
But the protection provided by Proton has its limits. When I asked Yen why he believed he and Proton were unprepared when it came to AI, he quickly answered: Agents.
“You can have the strongest encryption in the world, but if you as a user give your agent free access to Proton Mail on your device, and that agent goes crazy and posts all the information online somewhere, the encryption in Proton is not going to save you,” he said. “It’s an inherent limitation in what we’re able to do.” Theoretically, he said, Proton could develop its own agent against these vulnerabilities, but it is not in the works yet.
Also: You need to take a closer look at the permissions behind your AI Chrome extensions – they could be spying on you
Yen sees native AI as one of the best ways to address privacy concerns. (Proton’s own Scribe AI writing assistant offers users the option to run it locally.) Right now, it’s hard to do calculations on personal devices, but he believes local AI will be much more operational in the next few years.
“If you look at the modern iPhone and compare it to the first smartphones from 10 years ago, the amount of compute, the amount of storage is much, much higher, and that trend will continue,” Yen said. “But LLMs are not necessarily larger. In fact, we will have smaller models that will be just as effective over time.”
early intervention
One way to protect future generations from data privacy risks is to keep them out of Big Tech’s ecosystem altogether. Yen said he is focusing on the safety of children, because he believes this is where Proton can have the greatest impact. Last month the company launched the option for parents Reserve your child’s first email address With protons, even before they were born.
Also: Concerned about AI privacy? This new tool from Signal’s founder adds end-to-end encryption to your chats
“For a lot of people, the moment they start caring is when they have kids,” she said. “You have a choice: Are you going to sign them up into the Google ecosystem, with all the shortcomings and pitfalls, and lock them away for life by becoming an object to be abused by big tech? Or are you going to take an alternative path and set them up with a different start to life?”
For Yen, the timing of that decision is important.
He said, “If I offer someone a choice at the age of 40 after being exploited by Google for two decades, then yes, better late than never, but I think it’s much better if we can give the next generation the best possible start right at the beginning.”
Can Privacy-First AI Compete?
A future with less AI-driven data crawling probably only makes sense if done at scale. Companies like Proton face the challenge of convincing individual consumers and enterprise customers to care enough about privacy to abandon legacy systems and the attractive features they provide. For example, personalization is one of the most attractive benefits of AI, which is only possible with lots of data. Does this limit what AI running on encryption can do, or how successfully it can scale?
Yen said it is possible to compute effectively with encrypted data, but the biggest difference between privacy-first AI and leading Frontier Labs is cost.
“There’s Google Workspace and Proton Workspace, and they look alike,” Yen said of his company’s recently released enterprise suite. “But in reality, our job is 10 times harder, because we have encryption on top of all this. So it will cost more, it will take longer. But in the end, it will provide a better product for most users, because it will actually protect the data.”
Also: Proton launches Google Workspace alternative – and it’s fully encrypted
Privacy may lead to a better product, but who will cover those extra costs? of proton self declaration for scope It says it has competitive pricing ranging from $12 per month (paid annually) to $15 (paid monthly) for the Standard tier and $20 per month (paid annually) to $25 (paid monthly) for the Premium tier. Proton also said it does not raise prices annually or on existing customers. To clarify, a Proton spokesperson told ZDNET that running a “more efficient shop” keeps prices low for customers despite the higher costs mentioned by Yen.
“I don’t really see any technical barriers to achieving comparable performance,” Yen said. “It’s just going to take longer.” In the bigger picture of the company’s business model, he said Proton’s premium offering has proven to be value for money so far.
“the fact that We don’t have any VC investors “Kind of shows that, actually, this model is probably more scalable than most people think.”
