This page covers Hermes, a private assistant I run for my own household. It is not a public service. Only my family uses it, in a Signal group and in direct messages.
Google account data
Hermes signs in to its own Google account, and to no one else’s. With that account it uses:
- Gmail, to read and label mail. It reads the mail that school and daycare send, which our own Gmail filters forward to the assistant’s address. Mail from any other sender gets a label and is never shown to the AI model. Hermes does not send mail.
- Google Calendar, to create events. It adds proposed appointments to its own “Proposals” calendar and invites the two parents, who accept or decline them.
- Google Calendar, read only. It reads the calendars we share with it, for its scheduled messages: the school pickup question, the weekend plan and an evening overview.
Where the data goes
Hermes runs on a computer in our home and keeps its data on an encrypted disk there.
- Mail text goes to the AI model on our own hardware at home. No cloud AI model receives it, but the gateway below keeps a copy.
- Calendar details go to the same model. When that model is down, they can go to a cloud-hosted DeepSeek model through my own private gateway, which then receives only what that one message needs.
- Messages in the Signal chats go to the same model, with the same fallback. A photo is first described by Anthropic’s Claude, in the cloud, and the answer comes from that description.
- The assistant’s own messages, such as calendar overviews and notices about school mail, reach the family through Signal, which encrypts them end to end.
- Every request to an AI model, also to the one at home, passes through my AI gateway, Tailscale’s Aperture. It stores a copy of each request and answer, so I can check what the assistant did, for at most one year, and then deletes it. Records of which tools the assistant called can be kept longer.
Data from Google is not sold, not used for advertising, and not used to develop, improve or train AI or machine-learning models. Apart from the gateway and the AI providers named above, which receive it only to produce an answer, it goes to no one outside the family.
How long it is kept
Processed mail stays in the assistant’s own Gmail account, with a label. On the home computer, Hermes keeps short codes that identify the mail it has processed, its own replies, logs, and the history of its Signal chats: the messages it received and its answers. Nothing on the home computer is pruned on a schedule. It stays until a family member asks me to remove it, or until the assistant is switched off for good. Then I delete all of it by hand: I erase its disk at home and delete the mail and calendars in its Google account.
Removing data
Family members can ask me, in person or in a Signal message, to remove their data. I then delete it from the home computer and from the assistant’s Google account. Revoking the assistant’s access in its Google account stops any further access at once.
Google API Services User Data Policy
Hermes’s use and transfer to any other app of information received from Google APIs adheres to the Google API Services User Data Policy, including the Limited Use requirements.
Questions
See Connect for how to reach me.