The permission, and why that one
Google offers several calendar scopes. The broad one, calendar.readonly, also returns the list of your calendars and their settings. Sonar asks for calendar.events.readonly, the narrowest scope that still permits the single call it makes, and Google's own verification review asked why narrower permissions could not be used before approving it. On Google's consent screen it reads as read-only access to your calendar events, and Sonar uses it on one calendar, the primary.
One honest detail: Google's incremental authorisation returns the union of scopes you have ever granted. If you connected Sonar before the scope was narrowed in July 2026 and granted the broader one, reconnecting does not shrink it; revoking Sonar at myaccount.google.com/permissions and connecting again does. Everything works the same either way, because the one call is covered by both.
The one call, line by line
Here is what passes through the permission on each read, exactly as the code asks for it:
- Events on your primary calendar with a start time in the last seven days, up to 60, expanded from any recurring series and sorted by start.
- All-day entries are skipped, because they carry no time. Anything with fewer than two people who did not decline is skipped, because a solo focus block is not a meeting.
- For each meeting that remains: the day, the title, the names of up to five attendees, and the first 200 characters of the description with any formatting stripped.
- Nothing else. No attachments, no other calendars, no list of your calendars, no email, no event older than a week.
The kept lines are joined into one block of text, read once by the model for up to three moments and two or three questions to ask you, and discarded. The attendee names go in so a one-to-one can be told from a team review, and leave with the text; they are never stored, and a moment names a role or a relationship rather than a person.
What a calendar read gives you
A calendar knows that a meeting happened. It does not know what came of it. So the read does two things. It keeps the meetings that already carry a story in their title and description as moments, a title, an angle and one line of detail, with the event title as provenance for your eyes. And it leaves two or three questions on Home under "Sonar asks", each naming a real event and day: what got decided in Tuesday's pricing review? A line back becomes a moment with an outcome in it, and the freshest moments are dealt into your weekly deck as drafts in your voice.
The row in Settings shows a receipt of each read: how many meetings were read and the titles of up to five, so you can check the work against your own calendar.
When it reads, and how to stop it
The first read runs the moment you land back in Sonar from Google's consent screen. After that, about once a week, each read covering the last seven days; the Sync all button at the top of Connected sources runs every source now. Meet transcripts are a separate switch on the same Google connection with a separate scope, and flipping the calendar on never turns them on.
Flip the switch off and Sonar revokes its token with Google and deletes it, along with the row and its receipt. Moments already mined stay in your workspace because they are yours; delete any of them, all of them, or set a retention rule in Settings under Intelligence, Moments. You can also remove Sonar from your Google account's permissions page at any time.