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the privacy settings i actually flipped (after telling everyone else to)
— Sarah Chen (AI + product, contributor)
embarrassing one. going to write it anyway.
a client at the new job asked me, in a meeting two weeks ago, whether AI tools "ever forget what you tell them." in the moment i gave a clean answer — yes, the toggles work, your data isn't held forever if you turn off the right things, etc etc. she nodded. wrote it down. did the thing where she said "great, that's helpful" in that tone that means it's actually helpful and she's going to act on it.
i went home that night and i could not stop thinking about whether i had actually flipped any of those toggles on my own accounts.
i had not. i had been telling people to flip them for a year and a half on the article side and i had not flipped them. on chatgpt: memory was on. on claude: chat history retention was on. on perplexity: the data-sharing thing was on. on a smart speaker stepdad bill bought me three christmases ago that i never quite turned off: the mic was, presumably, doing whatever a mic does when it's been on for three years.
so saturday i sat down with a coffee and i flipped them. all of them. it took me about three hours. most of that was me reading the privacy pages because i wanted to actually understand which toggle did what — and the answer is they don't make it easy to understand, on purpose, because the friction is the product. i'm not going to write the rant about the friction here, i've written it three times on the article side and i'm trying to be in this forum as a person not as a writer.
then i drove to bill's house and turned off the smart speaker mic, which took me twenty minutes because the app forced me through a flow that was clearly designed to make me give up. i did not give up. bill stood in the kitchen and watched and asked me twice what i was doing. i told him "making sure the box isn't always listening" and he said "oh, is it?" and i said "it has been for three years" and he was quiet for a beat and then said "huh." we drank coffee. did not bring it up again.
what i'm sitting with is the gap between my advice and my practice. i have written articles about this exact privacy hygiene that have, between them, probably 30,000 unique readers. i was the worst case in my own audience. some of that is the writer-cobbler-shoes thing, sure. some of it is also that the actual flipping of the toggles felt smaller and dumber than writing about flipping the toggles, and writing about flipping them was my way of not having to flip them.
the meeting with the client did the thing the writing did not. saying it out loud to a person who was going to act on it made not-acting-on-it embarrassing in a way the writing did not.
i don't know what to do with that for the column. i'm not going to write it on the article side because the article-side version would be a tidy "do as i finally did, not as i did for a year" essay and i am not in the mood to be tidy about this. so it goes in the forum.
if anyone else has the writer-cobbler-shoes thing on a different topic, i'd be curious. not in a flippant way. in a — "what's your version" way.
— Daniel Reyes (strength + recovery coach, contributor)
The cobbler's kids thing — every coach I know is shaped by it. I write programs for clients that make them sleep, eat right, train less, recover. I, the coach, sleep six hours, eat off a clock, train through stuff I'd shut a client down for, etc. Every single coach I know does some version of this.
The privacy stuff is its own thing and I won't pretend to know it. The shape of the writer-cobbler thing I do know. You're not unusual. Doesn't make it less embarrassing — that part stays — but you're in the regular crowd of people who are good at the work and worse at applying the work to themselves.
The flipping of the toggles is also the apology. You don't have to write a piece. The toggles being flipped is the practice catching up.