Side by side

Lumo and ChatGPT will both draft an email, sum up a document or answer a question, but they handle what you type in very different ways. Here is what each company does with your chats, what each assistant can do, and what the paid plans cost.

Lumo from Proton and Mistral Vibe, the assistant Mistral used to call Le Chat, both come from European companies. For your privacy the gap between them is one default setting: Mistral trains on your chats unless you switch that off, and Lumo does not use them for training.

Gemini is Google's AI assistant and Lumo is Proton's, and each comes with a free version and a paid plan. They part ways after you press send: Google keeps your Gemini activity and has people review some chats, while Proton stores your Lumo history encrypted and keeps it out of training.

Both services ask data brokers to take your name, address and phone number out of the profiles they sell. What settles it for most readers is where they live: Incogni takes orders from Europe, while DeleteMe signs up United States residents only.

Incogni and Optery both chase your name, address and phone number off the people search sites that trade in them. Optery lets you look for free and costs less, but its checkout only lists the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa.

Both subscriptions pair a VPN with checks against phishing, scam messages and leaked data. They differ in what sits around the VPN and in how open each is about the price after the first 27 months.

Malwarebytes and Guardio both offer free protection in your browser and paid plans that block scam and phishing sites. They part ways on what the paid plans add and on the yearly bill.

Bitdefender and Malwarebytes both hand out a free scam checker and sell full device security on top. Bitdefender's free tool is Scamio, an AI chatbot; Malwarebytes offers the Browser Guard extension and Scam Guard.

Gmail is the inbox most people already have, free and tied to their Google account. Proton Mail comes from a Swiss company that makes its money from subscriptions and designs its encryption so that it cannot open what you store.

OpenAI trains ChatGPT on your conversations unless you switch that off, while Anthropic only trains Claude on chats you have agreed to share. This page sets out what each company does with your chats, how long it keeps them and what the paid plans cost.

ChatGPT and Gemini both start with settings that let the company do more with your conversations than a careful user would choose. The switch you get differs: OpenAI's stops training, Google's cuts how long your chats are kept.

With Microsoft 365 Personal, Family or Premium, Copilot sits inside Word, Excel and Outlook, while ChatGPT is a separate app you open next to them. The bigger difference for your data is what each company may do with your prompts and files.

ChatGPT and Perplexity both learn from what you type unless something stops them, and only OpenAI explains in its published policy how to stop it. This comparison covers training, how long your data stays and what the paid plans cost, for anyone who pastes work or personal details into an AI chat.

Both answer questions for free, and Duck.ai can even pass your question to a model made by OpenAI. What differs is the trip your words take: Duck.ai removes your IP address first and rules out training, while ChatGPT trains on conversations unless you opt out.

Brave Leo comes built into the Brave browser, while ChatGPT is a website and app of its own. On privacy they sit at opposite ends: Brave says Leo does not train on your conversations, and ChatGPT does unless you opt out.