Yen said Proton has been using the system internally for the past month and is now ready to roll it out to consumers. “I feel like it’s pretty complete,” Yen said. To compete with other online document editors, he said, the team also built in collaboration functionality from the start. This includes real-time editing by multiple people, commenting, and showing when others are viewing the document.
In April, Proton buy The encrypted note-taking app Standard Notes is a separate product from Docs. “It’s not really ‘take Standard Notes and paste it into Proton,’” Yen said, adding that the two apps’ coding architectures are different and that Proton Docs is “more or less a clean, from-scratch build of Proton’s ecosystem on our software stack.” (WIRED was unable to test Docs before launch.)
The big difference Proton adds compared to Google Docs is encryption—something that’s hard to do at scale, and even harder when multiple people are editing a document at once. Yen says it’s not just the content of the document that’s encrypted, but also other elements like keyboard shortcuts, mouse movements, file names, and paths.
The company, which announced last month that it was moving toward nonprofit status, uses open source codingand Yen said building the Docs system required exchanging encryption keys and synchronizing between multiple users. Yen said part of this was possible because last year the company added Version history for documents stored in the Drive system, which Docs is built on.
There are relatively few—if any—end-to-end encrypted document editors online. Other existing services that WIRED hasn’t tried include CryptPad And multiple note taking or notebook style apps. There are also applications that encrypt local files on your machine, such as Anonymous And Any type.
Recently, Proton has been move quickly to launch new encrypted products—adding cloud storage, a VPN, a password manager, and a calendar alongside the original ProtonMail email service. The company has also faced check some information It provided law enforcement with, for example, recovery emails that had been added to accounts. It changed some of its policies in 2021 after ordered to collect some user metadata. Although the company is based outside the US and EU, it still responds Thousands of Swiss law enforcement requests.
Ultimately, Yen said, the company is trying to provide as many privacy-focused alternatives to Big Tech’s services, especially Google’s, as possible. “Everything Google has, we have to build. That’s the roadmap. But of course, the challenge is in the order in which you do it,” Yen said. “In a sense, bringing privacy to a more mainstream audience also requires going further, trying different things, and being a little more adventurous in what we build and what we launch.”
