Swiss privacy technology company Proton AG has launched Proton Docs, a new word processing tool and document editor in Proton Drive, in a bid to compete with Google Docs and Microsoft 365.
The first version, launched on Wednesday, has real-time collaborative editing, rich text options, and multimedia support. Users can create, edit text, share with others, collaborate in real-time, comment, reply, and import and export file types such as .txt docx, and many more.
At present, it's just web-only and desktop-optimised, but eventually, it will come to other platforms.
Proton PR manager Will Moore said, "Everything that Google’s got is on our roadmap."
The company, famous for its secure VPN service, in a blog post said it launched the tool to compete against "Big Tech companies that collect and monetize" users' private information.
It claimed that no other company's editor has a default end-to-end encryption, which leaves the users' information prone to hacks and breaches.
"Once you provide your data to these companies, you no longer have control over how it is used. Data that you think is private may even be used to train AI in the future," it said.
The company claimed that every document, keystroke, and cursor movement on its Docs tool is end-encrypted, thus cannot be used to train the generative AI model and do not encourage or involve data breaching.
"Google can see everything you write and keep a record of all changes that you have ever made. Once you provide your data to these companies, you no longer have control over how it is used," said Anant Vijay, senior product manager for Proton Mail and Proton Drive.
He said Proton stores all its files on its cloud servers in Switzerland, thus giving high data security as it is subjected to the strictest privacy laws in the world.
Proton Docs, however, has some issues, like those related to formatting, and font and spacing while previewing. Moreover, Docs does not support Apple Pages files and cannot open Excel files.
The company said it is working on these issues and can expect an updated version soon.
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