Privacy and Staying in Charge

What to share and what to keep

For each bot, ask a simple question. What does it actually need to see to do its job?

Typing passwords yourself

This rule runs through every book in the series. When a bot needs you to sign in somewhere, you type the password yourself, on the sign-in page.

The shared computer

My first book explains a catch worth repeating here, because it matters most for personal life. Your bots work on a shared computer.

Checking what it can see

Every few months, review your connections. Which apps are connected to Grok Bot?

What Grok Bot keeps

Ask how Grok Bot stores the conversations, files and notes you give it. Check the privacy settings and the official privacy policy.

Other people

Life admin involves other people. Your partner's calendar.

The rules in one place

Here are the rules from across the book, gathered up:

• Anything that spends money is a draft first.
• Anything that books, signs or agrees to something is yours.
• Anything that contacts another person is a draft first.
• Anything that shares your personal information is yours.

When something goes wrong

Sooner or later, something will slip through. You approve a booking for the wrong day.

When to stop using a bot for something

Some jobs aren't worth handing over. If a bot keeps getting something wrong, or you find yourself checking its work so closely it would be faster to do it yourself, take the job back.

Staying in charge

The last point is the most important. Life admin is about your life.

Walkthrough: a quarterly privacy check

Every three months, the Parks do a twenty-minute check:

• Open the list of connected apps and remove anything no bot uses.
• Read each bot's description and check the "never" lines are still there.
• Check the Ask first rules are still on for sending, buying, booking, deleting and sharing personal information.
• Check two-step verification is on for email, bank and phone accounts.

What went wrong: the shared sign-in

Early on, one of the Parks signed in to their bank's website on the bots' shared computer, to download a statement for the money bot. They forgot to sign out.

A worked example: the request for ID

One data broker's opt-out page asked for a photo of a driver's license. The privacy bot stopped and told the Parks, as its description says.

A worked example: the unexpected connection

During a quarterly check, the Parks found that one of their bots still had access to an old email account they'd stopped using a year earlier. Nothing had gone wrong.

Questions people ask

Can I see what my bots have done? Yes.