Yen says Proton has been internally using the system for the last month and is now ready to roll it out to consumers. “I feel it is relatively polished,” Yen says. To compete with other online document editors, he says, the team also built in collaboration functionality from the beginning. This includes real-time editing by multiple people, commenting, and showing when someone else is viewing the document.
In April, Proton acquired encrypted note-taking app Standard Notes, which is a separate product from Docs. “It’s actually not ‘take Standard Notes and stick it into Proton,’” Yen says, adding that the encryption architecture of the two were different, and Proton Docs is “more or less a ground-up, clean build in Proton’s ecosystem on our software stack.” (WIRED was unable to test the Docs before it was launched).
The big difference Proton is adding when compared to Google Docs is the encryption—something that is challenging to do at scale and also harder when a document has multiple people editing it at the same time. Yen says it’s not just the contents of documents that are being encrypted, so are other elements like keystrokes, mouse movements, and file names and paths.
The company, which last month announced it is moving toward a nonprofit status, uses open source encryption, and Yen says building the Docs system required encryption key exchange and synchronization to happen across multiple users. Part of this was possible, Yen says, because last year the company added version history for documents stored in its Drive system, which the Docs are built on top of.
There are relatively few—if any—major end-to-end encrypted document editors online. Other existing services, which WIRED has not tried, include CryptPad and various note-taking or notepad-style apps. There are also apps that encrypt files locally on your machine, such as Cryptee and Anytype.
Recently, Proton has been moving quickly to launch new encrypted products—adding cloud storage, a VPN, a password manager, and calendar alongside its original ProtonMail email service. The company has also faced scrutiny over some information it has provided to law enforcement, such as recovery emails that have been added to accounts. It changed some of its policies in 2021 after being ordered to collect some user metadata. While the company is based outside of the US and EU, it still responds to thousands of Swiss law enforcement requests.
Ultimately, Yen says, the company is trying to offer as many private alternatives to Big Tech services, particularly Google, as it can. “Everything Google’s got, we’ve got to build as well. That’s the road map. But the challenge, of course, is the order in which you do it,” Yen says. “In some sense, taking privacy to a more mainstream audience also requires going further afield, trying different things, and being a bit more adventurous in the things that we build and things that we launch.”