Privacy policy
Last updated 6 November 2026.
Warded is a personal, open-source project run by Kriti Joshi (The Napkin Lab), who is responsible for your data. For any question about it, contact thenapkinlab@gmail.com.
What we access from Google
When you connect Gmail, we ask Google for one permission: to read your email (gmail.readonly). We use it only when
your AI assistant asks for email through Warded, to fetch those emails, filter them and pass on what the filter allows. We can't
send, change or delete email. We never download attachment contents, only their names, types and sizes.
What happens to an email
- It's fetched from Gmail and held in memory for the length of the request.
- Its sender, subject, attachment names and up to about 20,000 characters of text go to an AI model on Amazon Bedrock, which decides whether it's sensitive. Longer emails are cut off at that point before they go any further.
- Depending on that decision, it goes to the AI assistant you connected, with sensitive values removed if needed, or it's held back.
What reaches your assistant is then handled under that assistant's own terms.
What we store
| Data | Kept |
|---|---|
| Your sign-in email, Gmail address and Gmail access token (encrypted) | Until you disconnect or delete your account |
| Each request: time, assistant, tool, the search your assistant ran, and counts. A search can itself say something about you. | 90 days |
| Each email: its Gmail ID, the decision, the reason types and your feedback | 7 days |
| The filter's label for emails with nothing to remove, under a scrambled version of the email's ID | 7 days |
| Usage counters | 1 to 2 days |
| Service-wide daily totals, with no personal data | 400 days |
Never stored: email bodies, subjects, senders, attachments, or the sensitive values themselves.
Who's involved
| Service | What it does |
|---|---|
| Amazon Web Services | Runs the service in Stockholm, and the AI filter on Amazon Bedrock in EU regions |
| WorkOS | Handles sign-in, using your email address. It's a US company, so this may be processed outside the UK and EU. |
| Langfuse (EU) | Receives a technical log of each request: time, assistant, tool, result, counts, reason types, timings and error types. It has no email content, searches, message IDs, names, email addresses or account IDs. |
| Provides your email through the Gmail API | |
| Your AI assistant | Receives the filtered email, under its own terms |
Google user data
Warded's use and transfer to any other app of information received from Google APIs will adhere to the Google API Services User Data Policy, including the Limited Use requirements. In particular:
- We use your Gmail data only to provide the filtering you asked for and to show you what happened.
- We don't sell it, or use it for advertising.
- We don't use it to train AI models, general or otherwise.
- We only share it with the services above, as needed to run Warded, or if the law requires it.
- People don't read your email. The person running the project can technically access the stored records above to operate the service, but email content isn't kept.
Cookies
We use one cookie to keep you signed in. We don't use advertising or analytics cookies.
Your choices and rights
- Stop access: disconnect Gmail on Setup, or remove access in your Google Account under Security → Third-party connections.
- Delete everything: use "Delete my data" in Settings, which also revokes our Google access.
- Your legal rights: depending on where you live, you can ask for a copy of your data, or ask us to correct, delete or stop using it. Contact thenapkinlab@gmail.com. You can also complain to your data protection authority, which in the UK is the Information Commissioner's Office.
We rely on your request for the service as the legal basis for handling your email, and on our legitimate interest in keeping it secure and working for technical logs.
Security
Your Gmail token is encrypted with AWS KMS and data is sent over HTTPS. The filter can miss things, so don't connect an inbox where a single slip would be serious.
Age and changes
Warded isn't for anyone under 18. If this policy changes, we'll update the date above and tell testers about significant changes.