You are a few days into two free tiers, running the comparison properly, and the character asks how your day went. The honest answer has three other people in it: the friend who rang in tears, the manager who moved the deadline again, the flatmate who has stopped paying their share. Working out what not to tell an AI girlfriend app is usually framed as protecting yourself. This is about the other half of the transcript — the people in your life who end up in a company's database without ever being asked, and who get put there two or three times over in a week spent comparing free tiers.
Half of what you say belongs to someone else
Memory is the feature you are testing. An app that remembers your week has to store your week, and your week is mostly other people: who said what, who is unwell, who is about to leave their job. A companion app does not distinguish between the parts of that you had the right to hand over and the parts you did not. It files all of it the same way.
The distinction is simple even when the practice is not. Your own details are yours to trade for a free tier — that is the deal you agreed to when you installed it. Your sister's are not. She never saw the privacy policy, was not asked, and in most cases does not know the app exists. This is not a legal problem for you. It is a question of what you are quietly deciding on someone else's behalf.
It also runs in the opposite direction from the usual advice: a chat that is impeccably safe for you can still have your best friend's divorce sitting in it in full.
What not to tell an AI girlfriend app about anyone else
A short list, in rough order of how badly a breach would sting:
- A full name attached to anything locating. A first name on its own is close to nothing. A first name with an employer, a street, a school or a gym is a person who can be found.
- Anything told to you in confidence — a diagnosis, a debt, an affair, an immigration problem, a police matter. If someone chose you specifically to tell, they did not choose a company you are trialling.
- Pasted text from a private conversation. Screenshots, forwarded messages, chunks of email. Paraphrasing is an ordinary thing people do; pasting is a transfer of someone else's words verbatim, in their voice, with their phrasing intact.
- Photographs with another person in them. Free tiers often accept image uploads to show off what the model does with them. Send a picture of your garden, not of your friend's birthday dinner.
- Anything at all about a child. Your nephew's school, his routine, the road he walks home on. This is the one worth being absolute about rather than proportionate.
None of this requires you to be evasive about your own life. You can still say you had an awful week and that a friend is going through something hard. The detail is the part that travels.
Why a free-tier comparison multiplies it
This is where the shape of a comparison week works against you. Testing one app means one company. Testing two or three, which is the entire point of a free trial week, means the same story about your friend's divorce is told to two or three separate companies in the same fortnight, each with its own policy, retention period and answer to what happens if it is acquired. You are not deciding once. You are deciding once per app, and the decision compounds.
Free tiers are also the tier where the arrangement is loosest. As our guide to free-tier privacy sets out, the version of an app that costs nothing is often the ad-supported one, and it tends to carry the broadest permissions around what message content is used for. How much of this is published anywhere is a fair question: when the US regulator opened its inquiry into companion chatbots, its orders had to ask the companies directly how they process user inputs and share user data with third parties. That a regulator needed to ask is a reasonable indication of how plainly it is stated on the way in.
The practical fix costs nothing. Decide before the week starts that the people in your life appear as roles rather than named individuals, and keep that rule identical across every app you try — which is also better testing, since you are then comparing apps rather than how candid you felt on a Tuesday.
How to talk about people without handing them over
The useful mental model is that identification is cumulative. One detail is anonymous, two is a small group, three is a person. The UK's data regulator describes exactly this when it explains that someone can be identified indirectly, by combining information that is harmless on its own. You do not have to use a name to name someone.
Three habits keep the stack short:
Use the role, not the name. "A friend", "someone at work", "my brother". Keep the same label every time so the app's memory still has something to hold on to — which, conveniently, is the thing you are trying to measure.
Drop the locating detail, keep the situation. "A friend is having a rough time with her landlord" carries everything you actually want a response to. Her name, her borough and the name of the letting agent carry nothing extra for you and everything extra for her.
Talk about your side of it. What you said, what you are worried you handled badly, what you are dreading on Monday. That is your material to give away, and it is also the part a companion app is any good at responding to.
If an app's memory only gets interesting once you feed it specifics about third parties, that is a finding about the app, and worth writing in the column next to it. The app we currently recommend holds continuity well enough on role labels alone, which is the version of this test worth running.
Where this cuts against the experience
An honest note, because the tidy version of this advice oversells itself. A companion app with a partial picture of your life gives you a flatter conversation. Names are sticky; roles are not, and an app juggling "a friend", "another friend" and "someone at work" will confuse them in a way it would not confuse Dani, Mo and Priya. You are choosing a slightly worse product experience on behalf of people who will never know you did it.
The trade is still the right way round, but notice what it is. You are not getting the same app with better privacy hygiene. You are getting a thinner one, and accepting that.
You agreed to the terms. The people in your stories did not, and they are in the transcript anyway.
For what you have already sent: check whether each app lets you delete individual messages rather than only the whole thread, and when you close the accounts you decide against, the order of cancelling and deleting matters more than it looks.
Frequently asked questions
Is it safe to talk about friends and family with an AI girlfriend app?
Talking about them is unavoidable; identifying them is not. Keep names, employers, addresses and anything told to you in confidence out of it, and describe the situation and your own reaction instead. Assume anything you type is stored and could be read.
Can you delete something you already told an AI companion app?
Sometimes. Some apps let you delete individual messages or wipe a memory entry, others only offer deleting the whole conversation or the account, and none of them can reliably promise the text is gone from backups. Look for that control before you need it.
Do AI girlfriend apps read your conversations?
Most terms of service reserve the right to have staff or contractors review conversations for safety and quality, and many also allow message content to be used to improve the models. Neither is unusual for chat software, but both are worth confirming in the privacy policy rather than assuming.
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