Morning Brief privacy
- Only facts leave your Google account. Never full email bodies.
- They are used to write that morning's brief, then dropped. We do not keep them.
- The brief is written by Claude through Anthropic's paid API. Your data is not used to train AI.
- If you cancel, we delete your settings and your place on our list.
How the Morning Brief works
You open the Morning Brief link and sign in with your own Google account. That turns on a small app that runs inside your Google account (not on your computer, and not on ours). Once a morning it reads a few facts, sends them to our brief writer, and gets the finished brief back. It then emails the brief from your Google account to you. It sends no email to anyone else. Your settings live in your own Google account's storage, private to you; we do not hold a copy.
What the script reads
| From | It reads | It never reads |
|---|---|---|
| Gmail | For inbox messages from the last 14 days that may need your reply: who sent it, the subject, the date, Gmail's preview line (up to 160 characters), how many messages the conversation has, and whether you have replied in it. For each of those senders, a yes or no on whether you have ever emailed them. The number of unread conversations. | The full text of anyone else's email, attachments, drafts, contacts. From your sent mail it only checks that yes or no. |
| Your replies to your brief | If you reply to a brief, the words you typed, so the script can change your settings (for example "send at 6") or save your answer to that morning's manual question. The quoted brief underneath is ignored. | Replies to any other email. |
| Google Calendar | For today and tomorrow, on calendars you own: event titles, times, locations, how many other people are invited, and whether you accepted. | Event descriptions, notes, attachments, guests' names or addresses. |
| Your settings and your manual | The answers you gave at setup, your Money list and your Getting better at topic if you switch them on. Your Operating Manual: the jobs you picked, your answers to its questions and the written steps. All stored inside your own Google account, private to you. | Any file in your Google Drive. |
The script cannot reply to, label, move, delete or change anything in Gmail or Calendar. The only emails it sends are your brief, to you, and a page of your manual as a PDF, to you, when you ask for one. Google shows you the exact permissions when you switch it on.
What leaves your account, and where it goes
Once a morning, the facts above go over an encrypted connection to our brief writer. For replies that look routine, the writer drafts a suggested answer from the subject and preview line only; it appears in your brief for you to copy, and is never sent by us or by the script. If you keep an Operating Manual, the one job your brief is working on that morning goes too: its name, your answers so far and its draft steps, so the writer can ask the next question or write the steps. When you reply to a brief, your reply text goes to the same writer to be turned into setting changes or a manual answer, which runs on Netlify. The writer passes them to Claude, made by Anthropic, through Anthropic's paid API, and returns the written brief to your script. Under Anthropic's commercial terms, data sent through the API is not used to train its models. Anthropic keeps API data for a limited time for safety checks, then deletes it.
What we keep
- Your name, the email address or addresses your brief goes to, your plan, and the date you joined.
- A scrambled copy of your access code. We cannot read the code itself back.
- One line per morning saying the brief was written, how long it took and how large it was. No content from your email, calendar or sheet.
- One small count per day: whether your brief went out, which kind of manual question it carried, whether you replied, and how many manual answers, approvals and skips came back. We count whether you answered. We never keep what you wrote.
We do not keep the facts the script sends, your manual, or the brief it gets back. Our hosting provider, Netlify, keeps standard technical logs of requests, such as time and address, as any website does.
What we never do
- Sell or rent your information.
- Use it for advertising.
- Use it to train AI, or let anyone else do so.
- Read it ourselves, except when you ask us to look at a problem with your brief.
The Morning Brief's use of information received from Google APIs follows the Google API Services User Data Policy, including its Limited Use requirements.
Stopping and cancelling
- To pause or stop: open your Morning Brief link and tap Stop, or reply "pause" to any brief.
- To cancel: tell us at the address below. We remove you from our list within 7 days. Stopping also removes the daily timer from your account.
- To take back Google access at any time: myaccount.google.com/permissions.
Questions
Zach Heinrich, Main Street AI LLC, zach@mainstreetai.solutions. If this policy changes, we email you before the change takes effect.