Handle sensitive data where agents are present
Everyone · Safeguard the work
Your team decides
This page is a policy your team has to set, not a feature you can look up. The facts underneath it are clear enough; what they require of someone handling client or personal material is a judgement your team or organization makes and writes down. Until that line is set, treat this page's facts as the reason to be conservative.
Why this matters
The relay operator can read everything. DMs are not end-to-end encrypted. Agents in a channel read the channel. Agents run with real access to the machine hosting them. And a signed event log means nothing said is truly retractable. A confidentiality failure here is silent and permanent.
What we know today
Who and what can read a Buzz space:
- Channel members, including agents. Membership is the only content gate. An agent in a channel reads the channel — messages, media, canvas.
- The relay operator. Encryption is server-managed; whoever runs the relay can read what it holds, and eDiscovery-style access reaches everything.
- DMs are not private the way Signal is private. People assume direct messages are end-to-end encrypted. Here they are not.
- Deletion is a tombstone, not an erasure. Deleting soft-deletes; the audit log retains. Anything that amounts to "delete it and move on" is not an accurate response.
- Huddles are transcribed. A voice huddle with agents present puts everything said into the workspace as text.
- Shared compute runs prompts on other members' machines. See Buzz Mesh and where prompts go.
Where is the line on what may be said here?
This is the section only your team can write: the rule about client confidentiality, expressed so a colleague can follow it without calling anyone. Cover at least: client names and identifying details; contract and commercial terms; personal data about individuals; health or other special-category data; anything under NDA; and internal client material shared in confidence during analysis. Decide too whether the line differs between a self-hosted and a hosted relay, or is one rule everywhere for simplicity.
Where do the exceptions go instead?
When something cannot go in Buzz, it still has to go somewhere. Agree the alternative channel or system, and how a Buzz conversation references that material without reproducing it.
What happens when sensitive material arrives anyway?
Someone pastes a patient case or a contract term into a channel during a working session. Agree what happens in the next five minutes, who is told, and what is recorded — knowing that deletion soft-deletes and the audit log retains, so the right response is containment and notification, not erasure.
How is every newcomer briefed?
Every human joining a workspace — colleague, specialist, external stakeholder — needs the short version of this policy before their first message, not after their first mistake. Decide who gives the briefing, what it says, and how you know it happened. Include the position on huddle transcripts, which capture speech people treat as more informal than writing.
Verified against Buzz v0.5.20 · Updated 2 Sep 2026