Why are permissions necessary?

Great question!

When you add the add-on for the first time you will be prompted to accept these permissions:

'View and manage your documents in Google Drive' & ‘Connect to an external service'

‘View and manage your documents in Google Drive’, is language required by Google as our add-on modifies your document by placing an icon into it. This is the only way our add-on can modify your document.

The second line, ‘Connect to an external service’, is also required language from Google because our add-on needs to connect to our servers at https://thenounproject.com to fetch the icon that will be placed on our document. Instead of your computer downloading our icons (over 1 million) we instead allow the add-on to connect to our website.