Yen says Proton has been using the system internally for the past month and is now ready to roll it out to consumers. “I think it’s relatively polished,” Yen says. To compete with other online document editors, he says, the team also built in collaboration functionality from the start. This includes real-time editing by multiple people, the ability to make comments, and showing when another person is viewing the document.
In April, Proton acquired Encrypted note-taking app Standard Notes, which is a standalone product from Docs, says, “It’s not really ‘take Standard Notes and paste it into Proton,’” adding that the two’s encryption architecture was different, and that Proton Docs is “pretty much a clean, ground-up version of the Proton ecosystem into our software stack.” (WIRED was not able to test Docs before its release.)
The big difference that Proton brings to the table compared to Google Docs is encryption, which is difficult to do on a large scale and is also made more difficult when multiple people are editing a document at the same time. Yen says that not only is the content of the documents encrypted, but also other elements such as keystrokes, mouse movements, and file names and paths.
The company, which last month announced it is moving toward nonprofit status, uses open source encryptionYen says creating the Docs system required exchanging encryption keys and synchronizing between multiple users. Part of this was possible, Yen says, because last year the company added version history for documents stored in your Drive system, upon which Docs is built.
There are relatively few (if any) end-to-end encrypted document editors online. Other existing services, which WIRED has not tested, include CryptoPad and Various note-taking or notepad-style appsThere are also applications that encrypt files locally on your machine, such as Crypt and Any kind.
Recently, Proton has been quick to launch new encrypted products, adding cloud storage, a VPN, a password manager, and a calendar alongside its original ProtonMail email service. The company also faced scrutiny of certain information It has provided law enforcement with information such as recovery emails that have been added to accounts. It changed some of its policies in 2021 after it was ordered to collect some user metadata. While the company is based outside the US and EU, it still responds to Thousands of requests from Swiss security forces.
Ultimately, Yen says, the company is trying to offer as many private alternatives as possible to the services of Big Tech, particularly Google. “Anything that Google has, we have to build as well. That’s the roadmap. But the challenge, of course, is the order in which it’s done,” Yen says. “In some sense, bringing privacy to a more mainstream audience also requires pushing the envelope, trying different things and being a little bit more adventurous in the things we build and the things we launch.”