The Geneva publisher Proton launches Lumo, an assistant based on generative AI, designed to guarantee the confidentiality of exchanges. The service, based on open source technologies and hosted in Europe due to legal uncertainties in Switzerland, does not exploit or keep user data.
Based in Geneva, the Proton firm, known for its secure services such as Proton Mail and Proton Drive, widens its offer with Lumo, an AI assistant developed with a particular accent on the protection of personal data. According to a press release, LUMO aims to guarantee the confidentiality of exchanges and presents itself as an alternative respectful of privacy in the face of large AI platforms.
According to Proton, no conversation journal is kept on the server side, the messages being encrypted from start to finish thanks to an architecture called “Zero-Access”. The service also does not store metadata, such as IP addresses, horodatages or contextual elements of conversations. User data is not used to train the AI model, unlike other competing services. This allows users to process sensitive content (legal documents, health issues, personal emails) without fear of sharing or operating data, specifies the company.
Among the features are a “ghost mode”, which deletes conversation after closure, integration with Proton Drive for sharing encrypted files, and a web search function without storage of history. LUMO is accessible for free via the web or a mobile application. A paid version, Lumo Plus, gives access to extensive options.
Infrastructure transferred outside Switzerland
Proton indicates that LUMO is based on open source models (LLM), notably Nemo, Openhands 32B, OLMO 2 32B and Mistral Small 3, hosted in European data centers. The service operates exclusively on servers controlled by Proton, without collaboration with American or Chinese suppliers. Lumo will be the first service of the company to be gradually transferred outside Switzerland, due to legal uncertainties linked to Swiss communications monitoring projects.
Proton had already alerted last April to the risks linked to the future ordinance on correspondence monitoring (OSCPT), which would notably require the real -time collection of user metadata without judicial validation. In this context, Proton will invest more than 100 million euros in its European infrastructure, in order to guarantee the technological and legal sovereignty of its services, the press release said.
