AI assistants have promised what most businesses lack: Efficiency without any additional cost.
They can summarize your emails, respond on your behalf, decide which messages need decisions, automate calendar events, extract information from your documents, and even organize them.
For a founder or executive at a small or medium-sized business, where needs outpace resources, it can feel like a wish granted just in time. All it asks of you is absolutely everything — access to your inbox, calendar, files, and even confidential business information.
As much as 69% of firms are already using AI assistants like ChatGPT, Claude, and Grammarly — but 30% are unsure or don’t trust AI companies to safeguard their proprietary business data.
The trade off isn’t obvious at first. But what SMBs get in efficiency, they pay for in security.
The price of efficiency
When you connect your Gmail, Google Drive, or calendar to a tool such as Perplexity’s Comet, you’re granting it OAuth permissions — often beyond ‘view’ access. Depending on the scopes requested, the tool may be able to download contacts, control your entire calendar, and even write emails on your behalf.
These permissions are technically disclosed during the authorization flow, but most users don’t fully evaluate what they mean in practice. Once granted, the tool can access and process sensitive company data at scale.
The same pattern applies to other AI assistance workflows. Indexing internal knowledge bases, summarizing proprietary documents, or contextualizing company data, they all expand your exposure.
When you don’t know what access you’ve granted, you can’t accurately assess the risk you’ve introduced.
How much AI assistants and browsers can see
You know AI browsers like Perplexity’s Comet or ChatGPT’s Atlas(ventana nueva) can read the page you’re on, summarize it, and rewrite text. But did you know it can act on your behalf?
Because the efficiency depends on deep integration, the assistant needs visibility into your browsing activity and may request access to connected accounts. In some cases, it can trigger actions rather than simply generate text.
This is the architecture of AI agents more broadly. They’re designed to act across connected systems. A single compromised or manipulated agent can move through your email, calendar, files, and credentials in sequence.
That’s a consequence of how these tools are built. It creates a surface that researchers are already finding ways to exploit.
Security researchers have already demonstrated how hidden instructions embedded in web content can manipulate these systems in unintended ways.
One recent exploit, “CometJacking(ventana nueva),” demonstrated how instructions embedded in URLs could manipulate the AI into accessing personal or company data or executing harmful actions without the user’s knowledge.
Vendors respond quickly with patches and safeguards. In this case, Perplexity responded with a four-layer safeguarding approach. But the pattern highlights something more fundamental: These tools are designed to interpret and act.
Even Perplexity states in their Privacy Policy(ventana nueva): “No security measures are impenetrable, and we cannot guarantee ‘perfect security’”. The question isn’t whether a tool is secure now. It’s whether you’re comfortable with how much access it requires.
Where the burden of privacy lies
AI vendors emphasize privacy controls and opt-outs. Perplexity’s Comet Assistant, for instance, assures users that “Comet Assistant puts you in control”.
But those controls assume something incorrectly: that users understand how their data is processed, actively configure the relevant settings, and monitor how policies evolve over time.
In practice, most don’t. According to Proton’s 2026 SMB Cybersecurity Report, 43% of SMBs say they can’t independently verify provider privacy, and 35% don’t understand how providers handle their data at all.
Some information may be excluded from model training. Other data may be retained to improve personalization. Policies can differ across features and change as products develop. Turning off certain functions may limit the very capabilities that make the tool attractive in the first place.
In that environment, privacy is no longer a static product promise. It becomes an ongoing operational responsibility.
The burden shifts to you, the user. You must decide what data can be shared, to monitor policy updates, to configure settings appropriately, and to reassess risk as the product evolves.
This page collects practical guides and explainers on AI privacy and security(ventana nueva), so you know exactly what you’re working with.
Features of a private AI assistant or AI-powered browser
Your team should be able to use an AI assistant without concern that every interaction is being stored, profiled, or used to train the next version of the model.
- No data logging. By default. Your team should be able to use an AI assistant or agent without concern that every interaction is being stored, profiled, or monetized. If a tool builds “memories” or “preferences,” you should ask: Who controls this data? Is it truly off by default, or is it buried in settings? And if I turn it off, what product capabilities do I lose?
- No model training on your business information. Business documents, partners’ information, reports, or plans should never be used for AI model training. This is not only a fairness concern but also a security matter, as the data can resurface in incidents you cannot control.
- Real transparency. Transparency builds trust, but only if it’s real. This means that you should be able to understand, at every step, how your data is handled and what principles guide the product. If you need to spend two hours parsing Terms & Conditions that contradict your actual experience with the tool, that’s not transparency. It’s just a tagline.
- Zero-access encryption. With zero-access encryption, your data is protected by keys that only you control—not even the provider can read it. This removes the need to trust policies or promises because the architecture makes misuse technically impossible.
Most AI tools extract value from the businesses that use them. Your conversations, documents, and files feed model training, audience profiling, and in some cases government data requests — typically without meaningful disclosure or consent. Not Lumo.
Lumo is the AI assistant built for businesses that refuse afford to hand over their data for convenience. Zero-access encryption, no data logging, no model training on your business information.
