Why
Personal agents now fill in forms for people: insurance quotes, sign-ups, appointments. They type a name, an email and an address into whatever form is in front of them, and nobody checks who receives it.
Telltale sits between the agent and every website it touches.
- Before anything is typed, it identifies the recipient and checks it against the State of California's data broker registry, where 603 companies answer questions under oath such as whether they sold consumer data to AI developers or shared it with law enforcement without a subpoena.
- Ordinary sites pass without a prompt. For a registered broker, the person decides each field: send the real value, send a working value tagged to that site, or leave it out.
- Every disclosure is marked. Each site gets its own inbox and a four-character tag, and each decision is recorded in an Ed25519-signed consent receipt.
- Leaks become evidence. Telltale sends the broker an opt-out with a 15-business-day legal deadline. If a tagged identifier is later used by someone else, Telltale traces it back and drafts a complaint for the California Privacy Protection Agency. The person reviews it and decides whether to file.
The model never sees personal data. The agent describes form fields by type, and Telltale types the values itself.
How it works
flowchart LR
A["Personal agent"] -->|"field types only"| G{"Telltale gate"}
G <-->|"recipient lookup"| R[("CA broker registry<br/>+ Daylight sweep")]
G -->|"ordinary site"| S1["Website"]
G -->|"registered broker"| C["Consent card<br/>send · tag · withhold"]
C -->|"approved fields, tagged"| S2["Broker"]
S2 -.->|"tag surfaces after opt-out deadline"| T["Third party"]
T --> E["Evidence and<br/>complaint draft"]
| Step | What happens |
|---|
| 01 Intercept | The agent reaches a form and calls fill_form with field kinds (email, zip, ...). No values are in the model's context. |
| 02 Inspect | The recipient's domain is matched to a registry filing, with an Exa company lookup as a fallback. Daylight adds whether the broker hides its own opt-out page. |
| 03 Sanitize | Ordinary recipients pass silently with a tagged email. Registered brokers stop for a field-by-field decision. SSN, government ID, financial account and date of birth are never altered. |
| 04 Release | Approved values are typed under a tag, a signed receipt is stored, and the broker can be sent an opt-out of sale and sharing. |
What the public data shows
Figures come from the California Privacy Protection Agency's 2026 registry filings and a Daylight sweep run on 2026-10-22.
| Finding | Number |
|---|
| Registered data brokers | 603 |
| Say they sold or shared consumer data with a generative-AI developer | 32 |
| Say they shared consumer data with law enforcement without a subpoena or court order | 28 |
Privacy-rights pages hidden from search engines (noindex, X-Robots-Tag, robots.txt) | 55 |
| Brokers hiding their own opt-out page | 18 |
Deletion requests denied by the operator of bestautoinsurance.com in 2024 | 13,539 of 15,040 |
The last row is the reason for the demo. A car insurance comparison site looks like a helpful tool. Its operator, Apollo Interactive, LLC, is a registered data broker, and nothing on the page tells you or your agent.
Features
- Sentry pipeline. A live view of each disclosure moving through intercept, inspect, sanitize and release.
- Consent cards that quote the recipient's own filing, with the data's limitations one click away.
- Tagged identities. One real AgentMail inbox per recipient, an
Attn address line and a variant middle initial. Mail still arrives. The Identities page shows each site's version of you next to the real one, with its inbox and the mail it received.
- Signed consent receipts aligned with ISO/IEC TS 27560, verifiable from the ledger.
- Opt-out and deletion letters with deadlines tracked under 11 CCR §7026 and §7021.
- Leak attribution from inbound mail, with an evidence page and a complaint draft.
- Daylight, a live audit of every registered broker's opt-out page that records the exact tag, header or robots.txt rule.
- Encrypted profile. Personal details are stored with AES-256-GCM, with the key held separately.
- Dry run. Always on for the synthetic demo persona; a setting for real profiles.
- Light and dark themes, a seven-step animated tour and a public overview page.
Privacy and safety
- The model never sees personal data. It receives only field kinds and per-field outcomes.
- Details are encrypted at rest (AES-256-GCM). The key is a deployment secret or a git-ignored key file, never stored with the data.
- Fields the law expects to be true are never altered. The only choice for an SSN or a date of birth is whether to share it.
- The demo persona is synthetic. In that mode Telltale never emails a real company and never submits contact details to a real business.
- Simulations are labelled. The day-47 leak uses a fictional sender on a reserved
.example domain, and everything it produces is stamped SIMULATION.
- People file, not Telltale. Letters and complaints are drafts. Nothing is sent to a regulator automatically.
This is the beginning of the README. Read the rest at the original. Read the full README ↗
