AI Assistant Privacy: 6 Questions to Ask Before You Tell It Everything

A personal AI assistant creates a strange new category of data. It is not quite health records, not quite a diary, not quite financial data. It is all of them at once, in your own words, timestamped. The more useful the assistant, the more of your life it holds, which means the privacy question is not paranoia. It is due diligence, the same kind you would apply to a bank.

This guide is the checklist we would want as users, and we build an assistant ourselves. It applies to any product in the category, including ours. If a vendor cannot answer these six questions clearly, the ambiguity is the answer.

The six questions

1. 1

   1. What leaves my device, and when?

   Some processing must happen on servers; that is normal for AI features. The question is whether the app is explicit about which data travels, whether it travels encrypted, and whether anything is collected beyond what the feature needs. Vague answers like "we take privacy seriously" without a data list are a red flag.
2. 2

   2. Is my data used to train models?

   This is the sharpest dividing line in the category. Good answers are explicit: personal data is not used for training, or training use is strictly opt-in with a clear toggle. Look for the words "not used to train" in the privacy policy, not just marketing pages.
3. 3

   3. How long is my data kept, and can I truly delete it?

   A real delete removes your content from production systems, not just from your screen. Look for account deletion inside the app itself, a stated retention window, and whether backups are also purged on a schedule.
4. 4

   4. Who can see it internally?

   Reputable products limit employee access to user content and say so. Access controls, audit logs, and the phrase "we cannot read your data" (where technically true) are what good looks like.
5. 5

   5. What happens if the company is sold or shuts down?

   Data is an asset in an acquisition. A trustworthy policy commits to notifying you before your data changes hands under materially different terms, and export tools mean you are never locked in.
6. 6

   6. Can I use it without connecting everything?

   Integrations like calendar and mail should be optional, granular, and revocable. An assistant that demands every permission up front to function at all is telling you how it thinks about your data.

Where Tase stands

Applying our own checklist: Tase syncs your content through your own account so it follows you across devices, encrypts data in transit, does not sell personal data, and does not use your personal content to train models. Deletion is available in the app and removes your content from our systems. Integrations are opt-in one by one, and the assistant works without any of them. The full details live in our privacy policy, and if something there is unclear, we treat that as a bug worth fixing.

A sane threat model for normal people

Perfect privacy is not the goal; a fair trade is. You are trading some data for a working memory, reminders that fire, and budgets that answer back. The realistic risks for most people are not movie-plot hacks but mundane ones: data sold to brokers, quiet policy changes, and products that never delete anything. All three are visible in advance if you ask the six questions, which is exactly why vendors who deserve your data make the answers easy to find.