What you share, and with whom
Lichen asks you to make real choices instead of guessing at defaults you never saw. Almost everything here is on by default and switchable off — one uniform rule across the platform, so you never have to wonder whether this particular corner works differently. What changes is only ever what you choose.
This page walks the switches: your presence, your location, your calendar, your financial picture, and the assistant. Five minutes now saves you a lot of second-guessing later.
Presence: around, present, or neither
Two signals, both yours to give:
Around — a quiet dot when you’re here. On by default, muted whenever you like.
Present — the candle in the top bar. You light it by hand when you actually want to be found.
Presence lives in exactly one place: a panel your network can open. No ambient dots elsewhere, no timestamps, no “last seen.” Change either setting in the Mycelium directory.
Presence is a gift, not a status.
Where you are: five levels, per audience
Your location isn’t one switch — it’s a ladder, and you set it per audience.
Hidden · State · County · Area (town) · Exact
Everyone can be at one level, your mycelium at another, a specific community at a third. Most-specific wins, and at a tie the most private wins. The “Area” rung is deliberate: findable without being pinpointable.
Set it in Profile → Home location → “Who can find you on the map.”
Your calendar: busy, or the details
Sharing a calendar doesn’t mean sharing your life.
Viewers see one of three things: nothing, busy blocks (no titles), or full details — again per audience, most-specific wins. Imported calendars go further: their titles stay yours alone unless you explicitly opt that calendar in.
Find it in Calendar → settings → “Who sees my calendar.”
Your financial picture — the most private thing here
If you’re seeking subsidized care, an honest picture of your means is what lets the network route fairly. So Lichen asks for it, and then protects it harder than anything else.
Only you and your active care team can read it. Not admins. Not other members. Never a score, never public, never compared.
It lives in Concierge → Web of Wellbeing → Financial position, and sharing it is entirely optional.
The assistant: consent, both ways
The brain icon appears in each section of the app — Home, Marketplace, Calendar, Chat, your shelf. Tapping it asks the assistant to organize what’s waiting in that section only.
Consent runs both ways.
What your assistant reads for you. Nothing moves until you tap — no ambient reading, no background summarizing. Each section switches independently, so you can turn the assistant off for Chat and keep it on for Marketplace. Off means that section’s data never reaches the assistant at all.
What other assistants read of you. When someone you talk with asks their assistant to brief them, it reads recent messages in that conversation — including the ones you wrote. You decide whether that’s allowed: Profile → Notifications → “Let other members’ assistants read my messages.” Switch it off and your words stay out of everyone else’s briefings. They’ll still see that you wrote, and can still read you in the app; only the machine is held back.
In Chat, an assistant that is on receives recent messages from rooms you’re already in, summarizes rather than quotes, and is never handed your full history.
Two people, two switches, one conversation. Carbon decides; silicon organizes.
Notifications, and who hears from you
Two dials worth knowing:
Notification preference (Profile) — in-app only, or email as well, or off entirely.
Push on this device (Profile → Notifications) — per device, so your phone can buzz while your laptop stays quiet.
And two things that deliberately never notify: weaving someone into your mycelium is silent, and trusting them is private. Nobody is told they’ve been trusted, and no one can see a count.
Where your data lives
Your data sits in an encrypted, managed Postgres database, and every rule on this page is enforced at the database itself through row-level security — not just in the app’s interface. A switch you flip changes what the database will hand over, to anyone, through any door.
When you invite the assistant to help, the slice of data you consented to — that section, that tap — is sent to Anthropic’s Claude. Lichen sends nothing ambient, and your data is never sold, never advertised against, and never used to train anyone’s models.