How Ethos stores, reads, and forgets your data

1. Two kinds of storage, and the honest line between them

Ethos keeps your data in two fundamentally different ways, and the difference is not cosmetic.

Your Vault is end-to-end encrypted. Everything you put in it is encrypted in your browser with AES-256-GCM before it reaches our servers, using a key derived from your Vault password. Your Vault password never leaves your device. We do store your master key — but only after it has been wrapped (encrypted) with that password-derived key, so what sits on our servers is a locked box we have no key to. Without your password, the wrapped key is useless to us. This is why we cannot recover your Vault if you lose your password, and it is the same reason we cannot read it. Ethos never reasons with Vault contents — the assistant is never handed anything from your Vault.

Everything else — your journal entries, habits, goals, calendar, and the memories the assistant forms — is stored so our servers can read it. This is a deliberate choice, not an oversight. A companion that cannot read a memory cannot reason with it. If we encrypted your journal the way we encrypt your Vault, Ethos would be blind to the very thing you came to it for. So we made the trade explicit: the Vault is the sealed room; everything outside it is readable by the systems that run Ethos.

That is the ceiling, and we will not move it quietly. Outside the Vault, assume Ethos can read it. Your data is isolated per account, never sold, never traded, and never used for advertising — but it is readable to us, and you should decide what belongs in the Vault with that in mind.

2. What reaches the AI, and what it keeps

On our paid plans, the signal layer is on by default: background processes send the relevant slices of your entries to OpenAI to build your memory and surface insights. On the free plan, nothing goes to any AI provider. You stay in control — turn the AI layer off, restrict it to aggregates only, or shut it off entirely, any time.

When you do invoke it, only the relevant slice travels: the entries, timeframe, or context the request needs, not your whole history. We send each request with a "do not store" flag, so we are not asking the provider to keep the exchange on file for later use, and our agreements with that provider forbid using your prompts or entries to train any model.

There is one deliberate exception. Deep research runs for minutes, not seconds, so for those jobs we ask the provider to hold the response while the work is in progress — that is the only way to poll a long job to completion. That response lives on the provider's side for the life of the run, under the same no-training terms, and is what lets the report finish. Outside of deep research, the default holds: send it, use the answer, keep nothing on the provider.

3. How the assistant forms memory

As you talk and write, Ethos distills short factual notes — a memory that you prefer mornings, that a project matters to you, that a name belongs to a person in your life. Each note carries a confidence level and a mark of where it came from: something you told Ethos directly, or something it inferred from how you write and act.

All of it is visible to you. You can read every memory Ethos holds, correct it in your own words, downgrade how sure it is, tell it never to infer something again, or remove it. Memory is not a black box you have to trust — it is a list you can edit.

4. "Stop surfacing" and "remove" are not the same word

This is where most products get quietly dishonest, so we are going to be precise.

When you forget a memory, Ethos stops recalling it — everywhere. It is filtered out of every place the assistant reads from, and its search-index entry is deleted so search cannot reach it either. But the original record may be kept, so the action can be undone and so your history stays honest. That is suppression, and we call it suppression. We do not tell you it was "deleted" when what happened is that Ethos will never surface it again.

When you remove a memory, we go further: the searchable copies are destroyed and the record is marked removed so it can never come back into what Ethos remembers. A stripped-down, non-surfacing trace can still sit in our database until it ages out or you delete your account. We would rather you know that than believe a single tap scrubbed every byte.

"Never infer this again" removes the memory and also tells Ethos not to draw the same conclusion from your behavior in the future.

The only operation that erases everything is deleting your account.

5. Deleting your account erases everything

Account deletion is the real thing. Because it cannot be undone, we ask you to confirm a recent sign-in first.

When you confirm, Ethos revokes any connected Google access upstream before touching your data — and if that revocation fails, the deletion stops rather than leaving a live grant stranded. Then, in a single transaction, every record tied to your account is hard-deleted across the database, your long-term memory is purged, and your files are scheduled for permanent deletion, so nothing is quietly left behind. Connected integrations and stored tokens go with it.

A few narrow categories may retain limited information for the minimum period the law requires — backups, billing records, fraud-prevention and security logs — and are then purged on their own schedule. Nothing in that set is your journal, your memories, or your Vault.

6. What your export gives you

You can download your data at any time from Privacy & Security. The export is a single file containing every record you own: your profile, journal, habits, goals, settings, and the memories Ethos has formed — as plainly readable JSON.

Your Vault items are included too, but they come out exactly as they are stored: still encrypted. We cannot decrypt them to put them in your export, because we never could — only your Vault password can. That is not a gap in the export; it is the encryption working as promised.

7. The standard we hold this to

This page is the reference. When we consider a change to how data is stored, read, or removed, the test is whether we can describe it here truthfully. Never claim more privacy than is true. Never say "deleted" for something that is hidden. If a change cannot be written down honestly on this page, it does not ship.