The evidence.

• Email metadata: sender, recipients, date, existing labels
• Permission to create and modify labels in your Gmail
• Permission to create and modify Gmail filters

The permission that lets Brood file your mail also lets it read your mail. Google does not offer a narrower one that can label a message you have already received. Brood never uses it to read. Every request it makes asks for metadata only, through one module, and the subject line is not among the headers it asks for, so it never arrives at all. So the promise is that Brood never reads what your mail says, not that it can't.

Brood decides what to propose by rules and counts you can read, and never sends your data to a model, its own or anyone else's. If you point an assistant of your own at what Brood has learned, that is your assistant, reading your record, because you asked.

What it keeps, and for how long, is on the privacy page.

If this is a work account, its administrator may have to allow Brood first. If so, Google says so on its own page, and nothing is connected.

Brood writes what it works out back into your mailbox as labels, so anyone who can open this mailbox can read them, including a Workspace administrator if this is a work account. They could already read your mail. The labels add what Brood has worked out from it, and that part is Brood's doing.

Brood's permission to each mailbox is sealed under a key of its own, and that key under a master key held in Amazon Web Services' key service, apart from the database. Someone holding a copy of the database holds nothing that opens a mailbox.

• Disconnecting takes Brood's filters out of your Gmail first.
• Any filter it cannot remove is listed, with where to take it out yourself, and goes on filing mail until you do.
• The labels stay, and so does the mail under them.
• Then it asks Google to withdraw Brood's access, and deletes Brood's sealed copy of that permission once Google confirms; Brood stops looking at the mailbox.
• What Brood has already noted about your mail goes when you delete your account. Copies in the database's backups expire within 30 days.

The code that reads your Gmail is public, with the check that holds it to metadata, at github.com/Noisy-Brood/what-brood-reads.

Read it and you can see that every request able to return a message body asks for metadata instead, with a list of headers that leaves out the subject line.

It shows what we wrote, not what is running on the day you read it. And that no other part of Brood calls Gmail is checked on every change, over source that is not published, so for that half you have our word.

Every company that does, grouped by how close it comes to a person's mail. Brood's own permission to read Gmail comes from Google, which is in a place of its own: Gmail and Google Workspace, where your mail is and where Brood's labels and filters are written; and the company's own mail, where your messages to us arrive.

The app and this site run on Vercel; the database is Neon's, in the United States, and the master key is in Amazon Web Services' key service in the same region.

Google's security assessment is required before launch, and is in progress, not complete. An app that asks for Gmail's restricted permissions is assessed every year under Google's CASA framework, by an authorised lab, at a level Google assigns rather than one Brood chooses.

The SOC 2 audit has not been commissioned, and the controls it would test are being built now. The controls are documented as they are built, the period an audit observes starts at launch, and the audit itself will be commissioned when a customer needs the report, since one bought before anyone asks expires unread.

There has been no penetration test yet.

security@noisybrood.com. It reaches a person, not a queue.

Please include what you found, how to reproduce it, and what you believe it lets someone do. Write in whatever form is quickest for you; a clear paragraph is as welcome as a formal report.

An acknowledgement within three business days. That is the number we can keep in the worst week of a quarter, and a modest promise kept is worth more on this page than a fast one broken. After that we will tell you what we found, keep you informed until it is resolved, and credit you when it is fixed, if you would like to be named.

There is no bounty. Noisy Brood is not yet earning, and a reward nobody can fund is a promise that expires loudly. We would rather say so than imply otherwise.

• 13 October 2026: This page first published, listing every company that handles data for Brood.
• 13 October 2026: The code that reads Gmail published, with the check that holds it to metadata.
• 13 October 2026: The secret manager taken off until one is chosen. It holds none of your data, and is listed here once it is.