Who owns what the system knows about you

This arrived as a memory complaint, which is how it usually arrives. The character forgets things. Give it a better memory.

We worked on that for a while before someone tried a second character and had to explain themselves again from nothing. Same person, same account, same afternoon, and the new one knew none of it. Everyone in the room agreed this was obviously correct behaviour, because each character keeps its own record. Then everyone in the room sat with it for a minute and stopped agreeing.

The question was never how much

What we had been asking was how much does it remember. What we should have been asking was whose record is that.

In the usual shape, the knowing about a person lives inside each product that met them. It seems like an implementation detail and it decides almost everything downstream. You start from nothing with each new one. The same facts pile up separately in four places. The depth of the relationship gets divided by the number of products you use. And when you leave, the knowing does not come with you, because it was never yours.

The last of those is the one that changed our minds. A relationship you cannot take anywhere is not a relationship with you. It is an asset on someone else's balance sheet that happens to be shaped like you.

Ten shallow relationships do not add up to one deep one.

So we modelled the person too

The move that followed is simple to state and took most of a year. If a character has a self that we model, then the person in front of it gets modelled the same way, with the same layers, by the same engines.

Which means a relationship stops being a note that a character keeps about you. It becomes the surface where two modelled selves meet, and that turns out to be a different object with different properties. It can be deep without being owned. It can move.

Stated plainly, the position is that what a system knows about you should sit on your side of the table.

What that costs, and why the cost is the point

Deciding the knowing belongs to the person is easy in a meeting. It gets expensive immediately afterwards, because it makes a set of things obligatory that would otherwise be nice-to-have.

Deletion has to be real. Not a flag on a row, but an account of what exists, why each piece is kept, and what has to go when someone asks. Writing that down is uncomfortable in a productive way. You find out what you have been keeping, and occasionally you find something you cannot justify, and then you have to delete it before anyone asks.

A guess cannot be spoken as a fact. If the system holds a picture of someone, that picture has to be answerable: where did this come from, and how sure are we. An inference that cannot say where it came from does not get to be part of how the system sees a person. Two years of small confident errors is how a relationship quietly ends.

And the person has to be able to look at it. Most products spend your data on the character. The screens we built for this show it back to you: your own record, what stood out, and a note of how confident the system is that it read you correctly.

The most dangerous failure in a relationship is not a wrong answer. It is a wrong certainty.

What we do not have yet

The circuit turns, but not all the way around, and we would rather say so here than let a product page imply otherwise.

Conversations feed back. A character that has not seen you for days knows it, and opens on that basis. What has not landed yet is the full reverse direction: the main conversation with a character does not draw on everything the person's own layer holds. It reads the character. We are extending it, and until that is done this is a line we do not blur.

There is a harder question sitting behind the engineering one, and we do not have a clean answer. Portability is what makes accumulated depth worth anything. Accumulated depth is also the thing that would be worth the most to somebody else. The only structural protection we have found is to make the knowing belong to the person from the beginning, so that nothing has to be given back later, because it was never taken.