Privacy & Permissions: Choosing What to Share
You can get a lot of value from AI without connecting your whole life. Start with boundaries that feel right to you.
Start with a small amount of context
For this workshop, a few household routines, meal preferences, and recipes are enough. When running the setup interview for your Household OS, you can skip any questions you'd rather not answer. If you're not comfortable using actual names, you can use roles like “Child 1.”
Think about other people's information too. Share only what is needed for the task and what you are comfortable providing on their behalf.
Be very careful with sensitive information, including passwords, payment details, account numbers, government IDs, and medical records.
Choose how much access to give
Rule of thumb: connect the least amount of data necessary to accomplish a specific task.
Connecting an account isn't all or nothing. Depending on the app, you may be able to limit its permissions, share a one-time export, or simply paste in the information you want it to use.
| Instead of | Try |
|---|---|
| Giving an agent full access to read and send email | Give it read-only access, if your app offers that option; upload a one-time export of the emails it needs; or copy and paste those emails into the chat yourself. |
| Letting an agent read and change your calendar | Use read-only access if available, share an export of the relevant week, or just type which nights are busy. |
| Letting an agent send messages for you | Ask it to draft the message, then review, edit, and send it yourself. |
| Letting an agent buy your groceries | Ask for a shopping list, or let it fill a cart that you review before completing checkout yourself. |
Read-only access limits what an agent can change, but it may still let it read the whole inbox or calendar. Sharing selected emails or events also limits what information you provide.
Manual steps can be a sensible choice. If one becomes annoying, you can decide whether the convenience of a connection is worth the access it requires. Keeping the manual step is fine too.
Know where the information goes
Review your provider's current data-use, retention, and model-training settings. Free or paid, check the actual terms rather than treating the price as a privacy guarantee. Claude's guidance on sensitive information explains its consumer-product practices.
Where Hilary draws her lines
These are my personal choices, not a standard you need to match. And they are ever-evolving as the products evolve.
- I'm comfortable giving Claude and Codex full access to my email and calendar. I very rarely send emails that the AI has drafted; when I do, the emails start by saying "This is Hilary's AI assistant emailing on her behalf."
- I'm not ready to let agents make purchases for me, though some of my friends are. At this point I don't want agents to have access to my financial accounts or credit cards.
- I wouldn't give an agent ongoing access to my health records, though I would share a particular PDF for a specific task.
- I use Instinct more like enhanced search and don't connect any accounts. I'm cautious about free tools.
- I do not give agents access to my passwords, though I do log into certain accounts manually in browsers that Claude or Codex are controlling so they can do internet chores for me.
Your lines may be different. Familiarity can help you make more informed choices; it doesn't obligate you to give more access.
Choose your starting point
For today, it's enough to say: “I'll work in my Household OS folder, provide the context I choose, and review the results myself.” If you're not yet comfortable connecting an account, leave it disconnected.
Set up your Household OS → · Return to the meal-planner exercise →