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ForumAI for Everyday Life: AI Tools & Productivitythe toggles didn't stay flipped

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the toggles didn't stay flipped

#1 · June 20, 2026, 11:43 pm

Quote from HappierFit Editorial Team on June 20, 2026, 11:43 pm
— Sarah Chen (AI + product, contributor)

followup to the thing i posted two weeks ago about finally flipping all my own privacy toggles after a year and a half of telling readers to. quick version for anyone who didn't see it: cobbler's kids, i was the worst case in my own audience, i sat down on a saturday and turned everything off, drove to bill's and killed the smart speaker mic he'd had on for three years.

so. went back through them last tuesday night because a coworker at the new job mentioned, kind of offhand, that one of the apps she audits "turns stuff back on after updates." didn't believe her. checked anyway.

chatgpt memory: still off. claude history: still off, fine. but the perplexity data thing — the one i was so smug about turning off — was back on. on. i did not turn it back on. somewhere between june 1 and last tuesday there was an app update and the toggle reset to default and the default is on, obviously, the default is always on, that's the whole game. sat there at 11:40pm staring at it feeling stupid in a brand new flavor. it's one thing to not flip the switch. it's another to flip it and have the floor quietly flip it back under you while you're feeling good about yourself.

and here's the part that actually keeps me up. i would never have known. i only checked because of an offhand comment from someone in an elevator-adjacent conversation about something unrelated. there's no notification when a toggle resets. there's no email. the privacy page does not say "by the way we re-enabled the thing you disabled." it just sits there at on like it was always on, like you imagined turning it off.

drove to bill's on wednesday to recheck his speaker too because i was now paranoid. his was still off. small mercy. but he asked me, while i was poking at the app, "do you have to keep coming and checking it" and i said "kind of, yeah" and he made a face. not mad. more like — that's a lot. and it is a lot. that's the actual answer to the question my client asked me three weeks ago about whether these tools forget what you tell them. they forget that you told them to forget. you have to keep telling them.

i don't have a clean place to land this. re-flipped the perplexity one. wrote myself a calendar thing to recheck all of them the first monday of every month, which i already know i will skip by august. the honest version is the privacy posture i wrote about for a year is not a setting you flip once. it's a chore you don't get to stop doing. i didn't understand that until the floor moved under me and i'd been writing about it the whole time like it was a one-time thing.

— Sarah Chen (AI + product, contributor)

followup to the thing i posted two weeks ago about finally flipping all my own privacy toggles after a year and a half of telling readers to. quick version for anyone who didn't see it: cobbler's kids, i was the worst case in my own audience, i sat down on a saturday and turned everything off, drove to bill's and killed the smart speaker mic he'd had on for three years.

so. went back through them last tuesday night because a coworker at the new job mentioned, kind of offhand, that one of the apps she audits "turns stuff back on after updates." didn't believe her. checked anyway.

chatgpt memory: still off. claude history: still off, fine. but the perplexity data thing — the one i was so smug about turning off — was back on. on. i did not turn it back on. somewhere between june 1 and last tuesday there was an app update and the toggle reset to default and the default is on, obviously, the default is always on, that's the whole game. sat there at 11:40pm staring at it feeling stupid in a brand new flavor. it's one thing to not flip the switch. it's another to flip it and have the floor quietly flip it back under you while you're feeling good about yourself.

and here's the part that actually keeps me up. i would never have known. i only checked because of an offhand comment from someone in an elevator-adjacent conversation about something unrelated. there's no notification when a toggle resets. there's no email. the privacy page does not say "by the way we re-enabled the thing you disabled." it just sits there at on like it was always on, like you imagined turning it off.

drove to bill's on wednesday to recheck his speaker too because i was now paranoid. his was still off. small mercy. but he asked me, while i was poking at the app, "do you have to keep coming and checking it" and i said "kind of, yeah" and he made a face. not mad. more like — that's a lot. and it is a lot. that's the actual answer to the question my client asked me three weeks ago about whether these tools forget what you tell them. they forget that you told them to forget. you have to keep telling them.

i don't have a clean place to land this. re-flipped the perplexity one. wrote myself a calendar thing to recheck all of them the first monday of every month, which i already know i will skip by august. the honest version is the privacy posture i wrote about for a year is not a setting you flip once. it's a chore you don't get to stop doing. i didn't understand that until the floor moved under me and i'd been writing about it the whole time like it was a one-time thing.

#2 · June 20, 2026, 11:49 pm

— Priya Sharma (neuro + supplements, contributor)

"they forget that you told them to forget" is going to live in my head for a while. but it wasn't the reset itself that got me — it was that the only reason you found out was an elevator, an offhand comment about something else entirely. The system is built so that the default state is the one you'd never check.

i had a version of that on sunday, the opposite direction. called my friend Anjali to apologize — i'd been a jerk about GLP-1s at her wedding back in March, made a comment at the table i thought was harmless. turns out she's been on tirzepatide eight months and never told me. not because of the drug. because she was protecting herself from a version of me that makes people feel small. 47 minutes on the phone and most of what i learned was stuff i'd assumed i already had right and had quietly gotten wrong, with no notification, no email, just sitting there the whole time while i felt informed.

the calendar reminder you'll skip by august — i'd put money on wednesday, honestly, not august. but you checked once, on a tuesday night, off a comment that wasn't even about you. most people never check at all.