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Through Dazzle, Marissa Mayer is betting that a personal photo library provides deeper context than email and calendars. The assistant reads photos to extract interests and habits and suggest activities or gifts, but it still suffers from memory gaps, and the privacy of this data remains a central question.
Instinct, which is still in private access, is granted broad permissions to access email, apps, and devices and to take actions on behalf of the user. Its terms of service and early experiences, including storing text messages and sending email without confirmation, have raised questions about the limits of trust and security in personal assistants.