Documents Permission (what a plugin must ask before touching your writing)

What it is

A plugin that wants to reach the documents you wrote in the app must now ask, and the card tells you which of two things it wants.

Where to find it

Where you see it: the permission card when you install or re-approve a plugin. The card lists everything that plugin is asking for, and approving it is what grants the ask.

A plugin you already have, once it begins declaring these permissions, shows the same card as a "Needs your permission" prompt with a Re-approve button the next time you open it.

How it behaves

The two levels

• Read your documents — open and search everything you have written, and publish a document to a Google account you have connected.
• Create, edit and delete your documents — change or permanently remove anything you have written, including restoring an older version over your current one.

Deletion is named in the title of the second one, not buried in the small print, because it is the part you cannot undo. Publishing is named in the first one for the same reason: it sends a document out of the app, which "open and search" alone would not have told you.

There is no separate delete-only level. A plugin that can overwrite a document with nothing has already destroyed it, so a third level would suggest a protection it could not deliver.

Why the AI Writer will ask you to re-approve it

The Writer has always been able to create, edit and delete your documents. It just never had to say so — its permission card was silent about it.

Now it declares what it uses, so you will see a "Needs your permission" prompt with a Re-approve button the next time you open it. Approving restores it exactly as it was. The prompt is the point: you are seeing, once, what it could always do.

What this does NOT do yet

No third-party plugin can reach your documents. The Writer is still the only plugin allowed near them, enforced separately from the permission.

Opening that door to other plugins is a deliberate later step. Splitting it this way means the honesty arrives first, on its own, without changing who can actually get in.

For agents

A plugin author declares what the plugin uses in manifest.json:

{ "permissions": ["documents.read", "documents.write"] }

Each method is checked individually — reading needs documents.read, and creating, editing, moving, deleting or restoring needs documents.write. AI-assisted editing keeps needing the existing ai permission, because it spends the user's money.

Note the published plugin SDK does not yet carry these, and a third-party plugin cannot use them until the separate step above lands.

Contract: plugin-core-data-permission-contract.md

Related

This is one of the permissions a plugin asks for on the same card as plugin-shared-signin.md, which covers the shared browser session a plugin can request instead. Which plugins can be installed, and what the consent card looks like in general, is plugin-marketplace.md. The documents themselves, and the Writer that owns them, are described in ai-writer.md.