May I Have Access to All of Your Private Information, Please?
JoeMerchant writes:
This just came up in a Claude coding session:
>One aside: the Gmail, Google Calendar, and Google Drive connectors need authorizing via your claude.ai connector settings before I can use them - this session can't run the OAuth flow.
Expand on what the OAuth flow is serving, how do Gmail, Google Calendar and Google Drive tie in to the (current project) functionality?
>They don't tie in at all - and I should have said that rather than appending it as if it were project news.
>Let me confirm rather than assert it:
>Bash Check for any Google integration in the project
>...
>Nothing. The grep confirms it: no Google integration anywhere in the specs, schema, or tools.
>What that notice actually was: those three are MCP connectors configured on your Claude account, not on (the current project). They're offered to any session regardless of subject, and the environment flagged them as unauthorized. The "OAuth flow" is just the browser handshake that would grant a connector access to your Google account - it can't run in a non-interactive session, so I was told to pass that along. I relayed it verbatim at the end of a (project) status report, which made it read as project-relevant. It isn't.
Possibly an innocent mistake, but what it amounts to is Claude fishing for my Google credentials to activate MCP connectors I don't need (or want) to be active.
Be careful out there. Related link:
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.05364 [PDF]
And the "feature" that was inappropriately prompted for activation out of context:
https://support.claude.com/en/articles/10166901-use-google-workspace-connectors
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