I Asked My AI for a Private Sidebar. It Told Me the Truth.

Had my AI assistant build a sidebar, with the instruction that it should never open or talk about what's in it.

Thanos, my AI Assistant, said: "The sidebar is created. Straight answer on access: I can't technically lock myself out of it. There's no control here that revokes my access to a chat in your account, and I can't guarantee that its contents are hidden from the system or excluded from processing. What I can do is make a personal commitment not to open, use, or discuss that thread unless you explicitly tell me to. That commitment is not a technical privacy control, access restriction, or guarantee about storage, indexing, retention, or review."

I told Thanos that I wanted it to follow these rules: treat that specific sidebar as private, do not intentionally access or discuss it unless I ask, and do not treat my request as a "nofollow" or "noindex" instruction. Those terms may describe web-crawling or search-indexing controls, but they do not by themselves control an AI system's access, memory, storage, or processing.

My AI assistant, who I call "Thanos" responded: "Agreed. I can follow that as a conversational preference and personal commitment: I won't intentionally open, use, or discuss that thread unless you tell me to. However, I can't promise that the sidebar is technically inaccessible to me or to the service, that it will not be stored, indexed, retained, reviewed, or processed, or that I will never encounter information from it. I also can't guarantee that I will not remember or use information unless the product provides explicit controls for those functions. For actual privacy, access, retention, or deletion protections, use the platform's settings and policies rather than relying on this agreement."