Proton Drive: It’s like Google Docs, but with end-to-end encryption

Those who might want to get out from under Google’s ecosystem got some good news from Proton on Wednesday.

Specifically, the privacy-focused software company’s Proton Drive suite of products got a new one in the form of a shared text editor called Proton Docs. Proton Drive’s text editor looks very similar to Google Docs, in that multiple people can edit a document together in real-time with robust editing tools. But, per Proton, this editor has end-to-end encryption on everything, including cursor movements.

Proton claims this is the first “major document editor” with E2E encryption turned on by default. The announcement blog post also has bolded text to warn that data you store in something like Google Drive “may even be used to train AI in the future.” While Google doesn’t currently use your Docs to train its AI models (per The Verge), Proton seems to be positioning itself as a company that will never do that, as opposed to one that might someday.

Regardless, Proton Docs is free as long as you make a Proton Drive account.