Whose permissions does your company digest read with?

Paperbeam is a short company newspaper, written from the tools your teams already use and checked against them, so each team knows what the others did yesterday. Because it reads across teams, the first question a careful buyer should ask is about access. This post is that conversation.

The question nobody asks

When someone builds a homemade digest, they usually connect their own Slack account and their own CRM login to a chat assistant, write a prompt and schedule it. It works. Then it gets forwarded to the leadership team, then to a department, then to the company.

At no point did anyone ask: whose access is this reading with?

The answer is usually "the person who set it up." That means the digest can see whatever that person can see, including channels and records the readers can't. Nobody intended that. It's just how personal connectors work.

Personal connectors read what one person can see

This isn't a criticism of any assistant. A personal connector is designed to help one person with their own work, so it inherits that person's access. That's correct for one person. It becomes a governance problem the moment the output is shared.

The fix isn't to stop sharing. Cross-team visibility is the point. Sales should hear what shipped. CS should hear what was promised. The fix is to make the boundary deliberate: decided by an admin, for the whole company, and visible.

Five questions to ask any digest

Use these for anything that reads company tools and writes something people share, whether you build it or buy it.

1. Who connects it, and with whose access? Can any employee connect a source, or only an admin? Does it read with a person's account or a workspace app?
2. Does it read direct messages? Not "does it usually skip them." Does it request the permission at all?
3. What about private channels? Off by default, or on by default? Who can change that?
4. Can you exclude things? Specific channels, people, topics, or terms it must never mention.
5. What happens to personal details before a model sees the text? And what is screened out of what gets published?

If a vendor answers these vaguely, that's the answer.

How Paperbeam answers them

1. Only owners and admins connect sources. Connecting, reconnecting, picking channels, setting filters and disconnecting all require an owner or admin. One admin connects each tool once for the whole company and picks exactly which channels and records Paperbeam reads. Be aware of the detail underneath: for some tools the connection reads with the access of the admin who connected it. That's why the admin's channel and record choices matter, and why only admins can make them.

2. It never reads Slack DMs. No Paperbeam app requests a permission that can open a DM or a group DM. Archived channels aren't listed.

3. Private channels are off by default. They're read only after an admin turns on private channels for that connection and the app is invited to the channel.

4. Exclusions work on every plan. Admins choose which sources and channels are included, and can exclude people and topics. Editors can keep a never-mention list.

5. Personal details are handled before and after writing. Email addresses and phone numbers are masked before any model sees the text. HR connectors never request pay or compensation fields. Before publishing, sentences about a person that touch pay, health or performance are screened out by a keyword gate. That's a screen, not a guarantee, which is why the admin's choices in questions 1 to 4 come first.

On writing: Paperbeam reads from your tools. Our code doesn't write to your CRM or chat data. Where a provider doesn't offer a narrower permission, we request the narrowest one available. The Slack app that delivers the paper is separate from the one that reads, and it can post messages and DMs, because delivering the paper is its job.

For larger teams, Business and Enterprise add SAML single sign-on, SCIM directory sync and an audit log with export. On every plan, an admin sets how long raw source data is kept, from 7 to 365 days.

Full details: paperbeam.ai/security.

What we won't claim

Precise limits build more trust than broad promises, so here are ours:

• We don't say "sees everything." It sees only what you connect, minus your exclusions, and never DMs. That's deliberate.
• We don't say the sensitivity screen catches everything. It's keyword-based and can miss a paraphrase.
• We don't claim certifications we don't have.

Alignment needs a boundary

The reason to read across teams is that each team's knowledge is stuck in its own tools. The reason to be careful is the same: those tools hold things that shouldn't travel. A good company paper does both. It moves the news and leaves the private things where they are.

And unlike a chat thread, the paper is a dated, written record of exactly what was shared. More on that in Chat moves on. The paper keeps the record.

Paperbeam is 14 editions free. No card required. (Fine print: your free trial is 14 editions or 30 days, whichever comes first.)