Beginning last year, a wave of tech giants like Meta, X, Microsoft, and Zoom quietly have updated their terms of service to allow themselves to use customer data to train AI. Since 2014, Proton, the Swiss privacy company, has battled threats to their users’ data from authoritarian regimes and hackers. Now, the threat was coming from within the tech industry itself. For 32-year-old Anant Vijay Singh, Proton’s Product Lead, the mission became urgent. “Challenging Big Tech is hard,” he said. “But that’s what excited me.”
Singh is pioneering an approach that harnesses AI to enhance privacy, not compromise it. Under his leadership, Proton introduced three privacy-preserving tools. Sentinel, launched last August, combines AI with human expertise for advanced account protection. In July 2024, Docs, a collaborative editor challenging Google Docs, and Scribe, an AI email writing assistant, followed. Both keep users’ data fully encrypted, enabling workflows free from data-hungry giants like Google, Microsoft, and OpenAI. “We don’t just throw AI on everything,” said Singh. “We saw a use-case that we could solve.”
In a world where the wisdom “if you’re not paying for it, you are the product” rings more true every year, Singh’s work at Proton offers a compelling alternative—and it’s gaining traction. With more than 100 million users worldwide, Proton’s growth suggests a hunger for privacy-focused tech.