What we do not record, and why

Most product principles are about what a thing does. Ours are mostly about what it refuses to keep, because a room people speak freely in is a room that forgets.

Here is the list, and the reason for each line on it.

Conversations are not recorded

A huddle is voice, and the voice goes through a media server that forwards it and does not keep it. There is no recording button. There is no "this call is being recorded" banner because there is no recording.

We are asked for this constantly, and the answer has stayed no, because the moment a room might be recorded people talk differently in it — more carefully, less honestly, and with one eye on how the sentence will read later. Meetings have that quality already. The third space must not.

Captions are relayed, never kept

Turn captions on and the room captions — but the lines go from the speaker's browser to the listeners' screens and nowhere else. Nothing is written to a database, nothing goes to a log, and somebody who arrives a minute later sees nothing that was said before they came. We have a test that checks exactly that.

Keeping captions would make every captioned huddle a transcript, and a transcript is a different product: one with its own consent, its own retention rules and, in about a fifth of US states, its own wiretap statute. Captions are an accessibility feature. A transcript would be a recording wearing a hearing aid.

One more thing about captions: turning them on asks the room to caption, and the room never shows who asked. Needing captions is a fact about somebody's hearing, and a huddle that reveals who switched them on has disclosed a disability to everyone in it.

Chat is not saved

The chat beside a huddle keeps a short scrollback in memory — the last few dozen lines, so a newcomer is not staring at nothing — and it is discarded the moment the huddle ends. There is no chat history, no search, no export.

The only line that ever reaches a durable record is one a host removed, because a moderation decision has to be answerable later, and the record of it is the thing that was said. A report filed from the chat carries the line as its evidence for the same reason.

There is no friend count, and no mutual friends

You can be friends with people. The card you see when you click on somebody shows your shared history: huddles together, when you last talked, whether you are friends. It does not show how many friends they have, or which friends you have in common.

A count makes people countable. A mutual list makes the graph legible, which is how somebody learns they are the least-connected person in the room. A space is a place; a network is a thing you can be conspicuously outside of. Everything on the card is symmetric — as true on their card about you — and that symmetry is the test we apply to anything that wants to go there.

There is no "last seen"

You are online, away, or private. Away is faded and blurred, and it is driven by whether you have actually done anything, not by a timer you can game. There is no timestamp. Nobody can find out when you last looked at the space, and nobody can tell that you looked and did not say hello.

Private is genuinely private

Go private and you disappear from the field. Not dimmed, not greyed — gone. Nobody can see you, and — this is the part that makes it honest — you cannot see them either. It is a real absence, and it costs you something to choose it, which is why nobody uses it as a curtain. You come back with one click and nothing has to be confirmed, because nothing was lost.

A block is invisible in both directions

Block somebody and you become invisible to each other: no avatar, no huddles, no chat, no reactions. They are not told. Nobody else is told. There is a list of people you have blocked, in your own menu, and there is no list anywhere of who has blocked you, because that would tell you the one thing a block exists to keep from you.

What we do keep, and why

We are not pretending there is no database.

Your boards and documents — the personal ones — persist, because they are your work. A huddle's board is discarded with the huddle, and the surface says so the whole time it is open.

Who was in which huddle, so the "huddles together" line on a card can be true. Not what was said in it.

Reports and moderation actions, in a ledger, because the people who can act on a room need a record that they did, and deleting a space must never delete a complaint about the person who ran it. A report survives the space it was made in.

Your verified email, as your identity, and nothing about it goes to anybody else in the space. What other people see is your name and your face.

That is the list. It is short on purpose.

The objection we hear most

"But surely a transcript would be useful." It would. So would a recording of every corridor conversation you ever had at work, searchable, with timestamps. Useful is not the question. The question is what the existence of the record does to the conversation, and the answer — every time, in every medium — is that it makes people say less. The most useful thing about a corridor is that nobody is writing it down.

We would rather be the product where the good conversation happens than the product where it is stored. If you need a record, write it in the document; that is what the document is for, and it persists precisely because you chose to put something in it.

What this costs us

Saying no to recording means saying no to a feature that sells. It means a cohort that needs lecture capture has to use something else for that part, and we tell them so. It means no "search everything that was ever said" demo, which is the demo that wins meetings with people who buy software.

We think the trade is right, and we think it is the trade that separates a room from a surveillance system with a nice interface. But it is a trade, and it is fair to say what it costs.

The reason under the reasons

Every one of these is a version of the same idea: the product should know as little as it can and still work, and it should never know something about you that the person next to you does not.

Rooms where people speak freely are built on that, and always have been. We are just being explicit about it.