How to Protect Your Privacy While Using AI: Lessons from Proton’s CEO
Artificial intelligence tools have become part of everyday life—answering questions, summarizing documents, generating images. The convenience is real. But every time you paste a block of text into a chatbot or give a voice assistant access to your calendar, you are sharing data with companies that may use it for training, profiling, or advertising.
Proton CEO Andy Yen recently addressed this tension in an interview with Spiceworks. His message: you don’t have to give up privacy to use AI. But one specific risk keeps him up at night: the concentration of power in a handful of AI platforms.
Here’s what he said, what it means for you, and what steps you can take today.
What happened
In the interview, Yen stated that privacy is achievable in the AI era if you use the right services and maintain good habits. He pointed to end-to-end encryption, open-source code, and transparent data policies as the foundation of trustworthy AI tools.
But he also singled out a deeper worry. “The one thing that keeps me up at night is the concentration of power in a few AI platforms,” Yen said. When most of the ecosystem runs on models hosted by a small number of companies, those companies control enormous amounts of personal and professional data. That data isn’t just used to improve the AI—it can be monetized, shared with third parties, or subpoenaed by governments.
Why it matters
Centralized AI platforms create a single point of failure for privacy. If you use a popular chatbot, it may store your conversations indefinitely, use them to retrain models, or combine them with other data you have given the same company (e.g., search history, email, location). Even if you don’t share sensitive personal information, patterns in your queries can reveal a lot about your work, health, finances, and relationships.
The risk is not hypothetical. Data breaches have exposed chatbot conversation logs. Internal leaks have shown that some companies manually review user chats. And once your data leaves your device, you have little control over how it is stored, processed, or sold.
For everyday users, the trade-off often feels invisible. But as Yen’s comment highlights, the real danger is not the technology itself—it is the business model built around collecting and hoarding user data.
What readers can do
You don’t need to stop using AI. But you can take a few concrete steps to reduce your exposure:
Use encrypted AI services when possible. Proton itself offers an encrypted AI assistant, and other providers (like Signal or certain self-hosted models) respect your privacy by design. Look for services that store data locally or end-to-end encrypt your conversations.
Review permissions and data settings. Check whether your chatbot or assistant lets you delete chat history, opt out of training data use, or turn off data logging. Most mainstream platforms have these options, but they are often buried in settings menus.
Limit what you share. Treat AI conversations like public posts. Avoid pasting passwords, health diagnoses, financial records, or confidential work emails into any cloud-based model. If you need to analyze sensitive information, run a local model on your own device.
Be skeptical of “free” AI tools. If you are not paying for a service, you are likely the product. Free chatbots often monetize data indirectly. Paid, privacy-focused alternatives are more transparent about how they handle your information.
Use separate accounts for AI experiments. If you want to try a new tool without linking it to your main identity, create a separate account with minimal personal details. This reduces the risk of data cross-contamination.
None of these steps is foolproof, but together they shift the balance back in your favor. Privacy in the AI era is not about hiding—it is about choosing who gets access to your digital life.
Sources
- Spiceworks, “Privacy in the AI era is possible, says Proton’s CEO, but one thing keeps him up at night,” June 4, 2026.
- Proton’s official website for information on its encrypted services (proton.me).