It's 10:00 in Berlin. The extension is in the Chrome Web Store. The Starter plan is free, forever. Here's what you can do with it today, what it doesn't do yet, and why we built it the way we did.
The problem we built this for
Every team that uses ChatGPT or Claude eventually pastes something into an AI tool that they shouldn't have. A client name. A medical diagnosis. A draft contract. A patient ID. Once it's sent, it's stored on someone else's infrastructure, subject to retention policies you don't control, and increasingly to regulatory scrutiny under GDPR Article 9.
The standard response from compliance teams is to ban AI tools at work. That doesn't work — people use them anyway, just less visibly, on personal devices, on shadow accounts, outside any audit trail.
We built SOWA Privacy on a simpler premise: AI tools should be safe to use as they are, with the privacy layer running on the user's device. No proxy server, no API rewrite, no detour through someone else's cloud.
What SOWA Privacy does on day one
Install the Chrome extension. Open ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, or another supported chatbot in your browser. Type as you normally would.
As you type, sensitive entities are detected by local machine-learning models that run inside the extension — never in the cloud. They're replaced with neutral placeholders like [PERSON_1], [ACCOUNT_2], [DIAGNOSIS_3] before your message is sent. The AI replies. SOWA Privacy un-masks the placeholders in the reply on its way back so you read the real names. The original sensitive content never leaves your device.
That's it. No proxy server, no API keys, no DNS changes, no IT department involved.
A privacy product is only as honest as the data flow it creates. If anonymization happens on a server, the server saw the data. SOWA Privacy is local-first because there's no other way to credibly say "we don't have it."
How to start
- Install SOWA Privacy from the Chrome Web Store.
- Open your AI tool. The SOWA icon in your toolbar lights up green when protection is active.
- Type as usual. Sensitive content is masked before your message is sent.
Starter is free — no signup, no credit card. Pro adds the full detection set, all file formats (PDF, DOCX, XLSX), persistent dictionary, and email support. Business adds team admin, audit trail, and managed deployment. Both Pro and Business come with a 14-day trial.
What's next
The roadmap we're committing to publicly:
- Edge, Brave, and Firefox support
- Custom NER training for industry-specific terminology — legal, medical, financial
- Server-side audit trail for regulated environments (Enterprise, hosted on customer infrastructure)
- SSO/SCIM and managed deployment via MSI/MDM/Group Policy
- Broader language coverage for detection
Who we built this for
If you're a law firm, accountant, healthcare provider, bank, insurer, public-sector team, or anyone else with a real privacy obligation and a real desire to use AI productively — we built SOWA Privacy for you. Browse the use cases to see how teams in your industry are putting it to work.
Try it. Tell us what's missing. We're listening.