Being forgotten reaches every house you have been in

Two acts

Never one button

Make the assistant forget you, and close your login, are asked for separately. Forgetting empties what Ridgeback knows about you and leaves you able to sign in tomorrow. Closing your login means you can no longer sign in, and everything else stays exactly where it is.

One button doing both would have to decide which of the two a person meant, and they are not degrees of the same wish. Somebody who wants Bobby to stop calling them by a name is not asking to lose the house.

How far it reaches

Every household, including the ones you left

A forget is not scoped to the house you happen to be standing in when you ask. It runs through every household you have ever been a member of, the ones you left included.

The alternative is that walking out of a house puts your own record beyond the reach of your own request, which would make rejoining everywhere the first step of being forgotten.

What survives

The shape of what happened, and never what was said

Your messages keep their place in a thread and lose their words. The conversation the others had stays a conversation — the right number of turns, in the right order, with the places you spoke still visible as places you spoke. What you said is not in it any more.

That is the line the whole thing sits on. The shape of what happened survives a forget, because it belongs to everybody who was there. What was said does not, because it was yours.

Your role and your seat stay. You are still in the house, still with whatever you were allowed to do there, and nobody you live with finds a member missing from the list because you exercised a right that had nothing to do with them.

Safe mode

A child who asks to be forgotten must not come back unprotected

Safe mode stays on. It is the one setting a forget deliberately leaves alone, for the obvious reason: if being forgotten lifted it, then asking to be forgotten would be the way to get out from under it, and the person most likely to work that out is the child it is there for.

Safe mode is set on a person rather than on a group they belong to, so no combination of memberships lifts it. Being forgotten joins that list.

On the transparency page

One column was wrong and has been corrected

The transparency page sets out being forgotten in two columns, what goes and what stays, and until tonight it listed the messages you wrote under what stays. That was true when it was written and it is not true now, so the columns have been changed: your messages stay where they are and lose their words.