Your AI "Assistant" Has Access to Your Calendar, Email, and Files. Have You Actually Checked What It's Doing With That?
Somewhere in the last year, "AI assistant" quietly stopped meaning a chat window you type questions into. Now it means something that's been given standing permission to read your inbox, see your calendar, poke around your cloud drive, and sometimes take actions on your behalf without asking first. I've connected a handful of these tools to my own accounts over the past few months, and only recently did I sit down and actually look at what permissions I'd handed out. It was more than I remembered agreeing to. This isn't a "delete all your AI tools" post. I still use several of them daily and they save me real time. But there's a gap between what these assistants can technically do and what most people realize they've authorized, and that gap is where things go wrong quietly rather than loudly. Photo by Anna Shvets on Pexels What "connected" actually means When you link an AI assistant to Gmail, Google Calendar, Notion, or ...