Security

Buddy AI Note asks for access to sensitive things — your inbox, your calendar. This page explains, in plain terms, exactly what we access, why, and how it is protected. The short version:

• Buddy drafts; you approve what goes out. Buddy prepares replies, but nothing is sent, and no calendar change is made, until you review and confirm it.
• Your tokens are encrypted at rest with AES-256-GCM before they ever touch our database.
• Your data is yours alone. Every record is scoped to your account at the database level — no other user can read it.
• You can disconnect any account at any time, and we delete the stored access for it.

1. What you connect, and the exact permissions

Connecting an account is optional and each one is separate. When you connect one, these are the exact permissions we request from the provider:

Gmail (Google)

• gmail.modify — read your mail so Buddy can find what needs a reply, apply Buddy's labels, and place the replies you approve. This scope technically permits sending; see section 2 for the hard limit we place on it.
• userinfo.email — confirm which mailbox you connected.

Outlook (Microsoft)

• Mail.ReadWrite and Mail.Send — the same read-and-place-replies capability as Gmail, again bounded by section 2.
• MailboxSettings.ReadWrite — mirror Buddy's categories onto your mailbox.
• User.Read — confirm which mailbox you connected.

Calendar (Google / Outlook)

• Google calendar / calendar.events, or Microsoft Calendars.ReadWrite — read your agenda and create or update the events you approve. Microsoft OnlineMeetings.ReadWrite adds meeting links when you ask for them.

Google Drive (optional)

• drive.readonly — read-only, and only used for files you explicitly bring into Buddy.

2. Buddy drafts. You decide what leaves.

The mail permissions above allow sending, because Buddy has to be able to place a reply once you approve it. But Buddy never sends on its own. In the background it only ever prepares a draft and sets it aside for you. An email leaves your account only when you have read the draft and pressed send yourself. The same rule governs your calendar: Buddy proposes events and changes, and nothing is written to your calendar until you confirm.

3. How your access is stored

To find new mail and prepare drafts for you even while you are not looking, Buddy keeps a connection to your account. That means we store the access token the provider gives us. We protect it two ways:

• Encrypted at rest. Tokens are encrypted with AES-256-GCM before they are written to the database. The plaintext token is never stored.
• Isolated per user. Row-level security ties every token and every piece of your data to your account, enforced by the database itself — a query run as another user cannot return your rows.

4. How AI touches your content

To draft a reply in your voice, extract a task, or summarize a thread, the relevant content is sent to our AI provider for that single request and the result is returned to you. Your email, calendar, and note content is not used to train AI models. The search index that lets Buddy connect your notes is built by our own self-hosted embedding model, not a third-party service.

5. You stay in control

• Disconnect any account anytime from the Integrations page. When you do, we delete the stored access for that account.
• Revoke at the source. You can also remove Buddy from your Google Account permissions, or from the connected-apps settings of your Microsoft account.
• Delete your account to remove your data. See our Privacy Policy for what is kept and for how long.