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Should You Trust a Social Media Company With Your Most Important Documents?

Big tech wants your inbox, calendar and soon your paperwork. A look at their privacy track record and what to demand before you hand over tax returns and IDs.

The biggest tech companies are building AI assistants that want access to your email, your calendar and your payments. The obvious next step is your documents: tax returns, insurance policies, IDs, medical records. Before you hand those over, it's worth looking at the track record — not the marketing.

The track record, in their regulators' words

  • $5 billion (2019). The FTC's penalty against Facebook — the largest privacy penalty it had ever imposed — for deceiving users about their ability to control who could see their personal information. The FTC said Facebook shared friends' data with third-party apps even when those friends had chosen stricter settings.
  • €1.2 billion (2023). Ireland's Data Protection Commission fined Meta for transferring Europeans' personal data to the United States in violation of the GDPR — the largest GDPR fine to date when it was issued.
  • $391.5 million (2022). Google settled with 40 U.S. states over claims it kept collecting location information after people thought they had turned location tracking off.

These aren't rumors or one-off bugs. They're findings and settlements about how the companies chose to handle personal data.

Why their incentives point the wrong way

For an ad-funded company, knowing more about you is the product. Every new kind of data — what you buy, where you go, who you talk to — makes their advertising more valuable. A promise to keep one product's data separate may be sincere, but it sits inside a company whose core business depends on the opposite.

The new frontier: AI that remembers you

In September 2026 Meta launched Muse, a personal AI agent that can connect to email, calendars and payment services and keep working after you close the app. Reporting on it raised pointed questions: TIME's review of its instructions described constantly updated notes about users and the people they know, and Muse interactions are used to train Meta's AI by default unless you opt out. Meta says Muse conversations and data are not shared with its advertising systems.

Take Meta at its word on ads. The question for your paperwork is still simple: do you want your tax returns and your kids' passports in a system designed to learn as much about you as possible, run by a company with this history?

What to look for instead

  1. A business model that doesn't need your data. You should be the paying customer, not the product.
  2. No AI training on your files — and no opt-out you have to go hunting for.
  3. A short, named list of who handles your data, and why.
  4. Two-factor sign-in on every account and encryption in transit and at rest.
  5. A real exit: one-click export and an account delete that actually deletes.

That's the standard we hold Unfoggable to. We're paid by subscribers, not advertisers, and your documents are read only to file them for you. Your most important paperwork deserves a vault, not a feed.

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