County permitting designs a multi-agent planner that shares full applicant dossiers between every agent hop. What change best reduces exposure?

County permitting multi-agent planners that share full applicant dossiers on every hop maximize unnecessary disclosure of resident PII and sensitive application content. The best reduction is minimizing shared context so each agent receives only the fields required for its task. Purpose-limited handoffs shrink exposure if a downstream agent is compromised, logged verbosely, or later reused in a less trusted civic channel, while still allowing the workflow to complete permitting steps.

Encrypting dossiers with a single county-wide shared password emailed to all agents fails by concept: a shared password emailed to agents is weak key distribution, not least-privilege data sharing, and every agent still receives the full dossier plaintext after decryption. Requiring agents to paste the full dossier into every outbound civic email expands exposure to mail systems, recipients, and archives rather than reducing it. Storing applicant SSNs in agent system prompts for faster lookups embeds highly sensitive identifiers into durable prompt context that can leak across sessions, logs, and model providers.

Exam caveat: context minimization is a data-minimization control; it complements encryption and access control but does not replace them when residual fields remain sensitive. Operational check: define a per-agent field allowlist for permitting tasks (e.g., parcel ID for zoning check, contact email only for notice), strip SSNs and full application PDFs from inter-agent messages unless required, and spot-check planner traces to confirm downstream agents never receive unused dossier sections.