Software that knows you this well has to answer to you
The last era of consumer software was built on a simple trade that nobody fully said out loud: the product is free, and in exchange it gets to know you a little. Your clicks, your watch time, the ads you slowed down for. That trade built trillion-dollar companies on knowing people a little.
The products being built now, mine included, are asking to know you a lot. Not your click patterns. Your 2am reasoning. The fight you're not proud of. The fear under the plan under the goal. An AI companion that works is, by definition, a system holding the most sensitive record of a person that has ever existed outside their own head.
You cannot run the old trade on that material. I want to say that as someone building in this category, before the category settles its habits: the attention-economy playbook applied to interior lives is not a business model, it is a betrayal with a subscription tier. So here are the rules I think any product like this owes you, stated as plainly as I can manage. They are the rules I build under.
You pay, so you are the customer
Free is a price somebody pays somewhere. When software holds your interior life, there is exactly one acceptable somebody: you. A companion funded by your subscription answers to you. A companion funded by anything that requires your data to circulate answers to that circulation. This is why I charge money for something people expect to be free, and why I will keep doing it. The invoice is the governance model. When you pay, the incentives all point the same direction: the product succeeds by being worth it to you, and by nothing else.
Your interior life is never inventory
What you tell a companion is not sold, not rented, not brokered, not "shared with partners," not aggregated into an audience segment. Ever. There is no version of "anonymized" that makes the contents of a person's private reflections acceptable merchandise. This should not be a differentiator. It should be the floor of the category, the way "the bank does not sell your safe-deposit box" is the floor of banking. Right now it has to be said explicitly, so I'm saying it: never inventory.
Deletion must be an act, not a request
If you leave, you take everything. Not a support ticket, not a thirty-day review, not "deactivated." A button, in the product, that ends in your data being gone. The right to be forgotten by your own tools is not a compliance checkbox. For software this intimate it is the escape hatch that makes trusting it rational in the first place. You can walk away, therefore you can afford to stay.
Walls between contexts
The subtler rule, and the one I think this category will get wrong first: what you confide in one context must not become ambient material in another. A company that builds several products for one person's life will be tempted to see "one user, one pool of data, many surfaces." Resist that framing. Confidences are made to a context. Something told in one room was told to that room, and moving it, even helpfully, even internally, breaks the thing that made the telling possible. Sharing a philosophy across products is coherence. Sharing a database across confidences is a leak with a roadmap.
The model of you belongs to you
Anything the system believes about you, you can see, correct, and strike. A hidden profile of your patterns, however accurate, however benign, is surveillance in a warmer coat. The line I wrote when I first started thinking about machine memory still holds: a memory you cannot inspect is not yours, and software that knows you this well while answering to someone else is not a companion. It's an informant.
None of this is heroic. It is the minimum standard that makes the whole category safe to exist, and the reason I'm publishing it is accountability: these five rules are checkable, and I intend to keep being checkable against them. Trust in this era will not come from claims about model quality, which nobody outside can verify anyway. It will come from structures anyone can audit: who pays, who reads, what deletes, where the walls are.
Ask those four questions of anything that wants to know you. Including mine.