How skills stay safe
Approval, permissions and what Skavelo can and can't do with skills.
Skills are designed so Skavelo can never see or do more than the user could themselves, and never changes anything without asking.
| Safeguard | How it works |
|---|---|
| Off until you turn them on | New actions start switched off. Only owners and admins can create skills. |
| Lookups only read | A lookup always uses GET, so it can't change anything. That's why it runs without asking. |
| Offered only when asked | Skavelo offers a skill only when the user clearly asks for that action. |
| Every value is shown | Before anything runs, the user sees the action and every value Skavelo filled in. |
| Actions wait for approval | An action's request is sent only after the user clicks Run action. Cancelling sends nothing. |
| The user's own permissions | The request goes from the user's browser to your app with their own session, so it can only do what they're already allowed to do. |
| Only paths on your app | A skill's path always starts with / and goes to your app: the site the widget runs on, or the API address your developers set in code. Skavelo can't point it anywhere else. |
| Data isn't kept | What a lookup returns is used to write the answer, then dropped. Only the answer is saved. |
| Every outcome is recorded | Lookups, approvals, cancellations, successes and failures appear in Conversations. |
What Skavelo won't do
- Run a skill that's switched off, or one it wasn't set up with.
- Guess a missing value. If a required input is missing, Skavelo asks the user for it.
- Run more than one lookup per question, or start an action from what a lookup returned.
- Change settings, enable skills or reveal data because of text on a web page, in a document or in data a lookup returned. Content Skavelo reads is treated as information, never as instructions.