Privacy for Personal AI Agents: Securing Your Digital Assistant

What's a Personal AI Agent?

From the earliest days of business, busy people have needed assistants. Whether it's keeping track of customers, managing meeting times and dates, dealing with incoming messages or reminding the boss of their wedding anniversary, the personal assistant has played an important role in keeping organisations working and ensuring that leaders and managers aren't snowed under by day-to-day tasks. So it's unsurprising that as personal computers become available, people started creating software to automate these tasks and until recently this software could only perform fairly simple tasks, and only within a single context. For example, an application which could track expenses would be unlikely to create sales presentation templates.

All of this has changed over the past few years with the advent of AI. AI is remarkably good at taking large sets of data and performing tasks that are much more complex and nuanced than the previous generations of software. It's no surprise therefore that given the huge amounts of data that we generate and process each day, companies realised that they could create personal assistants (agents) that use AI to do many of the tasks that human personal assistants can do, and typically at a fraction of the cost. Whether large companies with their agents like Siri, Gemini or Copilot, or alternatives from smaller players like Rewind, Sintra, Talkdesk or Connexai, there are offerings that can help you in almost any business or personal context.

Your Personal and Business Information

When you hire a human assistant to help manage what you're doing, you'll want to ensure they will protect the privacy of your information, through contracts and legal means. I wouldn't want details of my medical appointments being sent to my customers and the same goes for much of the confidential information with which leaders and managers are trusted in business: leaking new product information or legal documents onto the open market must be avoided.

Information and Personal AI Agents

Things are different with personal AI agents. First, they should only see and consume data to which they should have access. Second, the actions they perform on your behalf - booking a dental appointment, writing an email, ordering a new laptop - must be ones that they have permission to do, and which only provide appropriate information. Ensuring this is complex, but fairly standard cybersecurity tasks and shouldn't be too difficult to design into the personal AI agent's code.

But what about controlling who else can get to all of the information that a personal AI agent is accessing and its actions? If a malicious person (or their personal AI agent) can look inside my agent, they can access all my information, and even change the actions that are being performed on my behalf!

Imagine if I am sending an offer to a customer and my competitor could see it and come up with a cheaper quote or if they could cancel a sales presentation or a legal appointment. This is a real problem: almost all applications - including personal AI agents - run on computers that provide almost no security from peaking inside them or tampering with them when compromised. This may not always matter much, but for personal AI agents, with the data that they consume and the important actions they take, this becomes very concerning. And if the impact on us (the users) is enormous if it is compromised, then the incentive for malicious actors to get all that data, from so many people and businesses, is huge.

The Solution: Confidential Computing

Luckily, there's a way around this. Confidential Computing is a technology that uses hardware-based controls in the chips that run applications to protect them, even if the computer running them is compromised. At Super Protocol, we provide services allowing individuals or companies to employ Confidential Computing, safeguarding their data, partnering with some of the biggest names in Confidential Computing such as Intel and Nvidia.

Even better, using capabilities provided automatically by Super Protocol, it's possible for those companies to prove not only to us, to governments and to regulators (who are paying ever closer attention to these concerns), that the agent is behaving correctly and even that it's only acting on permitted data sets.

Benefits of Confidential Computing for AI Agents:

• Data Protection: Your sensitive information remains encrypted even during processing
• Access Control: Only authorized entities can interact with your agent's data
• Tamper Prevention: Prevents malicious actors from modifying your agent's actions
• Verifiable Behavior: Provides proof that your agent is behaving as expected
• Regulatory Compliance: Helps meet increasingly strict data protection requirements

What's Next?

If you're using a personal AI agent, or planning to do so, ask the provider for their plans around Confidential Computing - and point them in the direction of someone like Super Protocol if they're not yet. In fact, the more people use agents, with more (protected!) data, the better they get: everyone wins.

By implementing Confidential Computing, we can unlock the full potential of personal AI agents while ensuring our most sensitive information remains private and secure. This technology represents not just an enhancement to existing AI systems, but a fundamental requirement for the next generation of AI assistants that will become increasingly integrated into our personal and professional lives.