AI, privacy & your choices

Meet the assistant. Keep the agency.

AckySHINE AI is a clearly identified software assistant. It can help you express yourself and find shared interests. It is not a human, a romantic partner or a replacement for real relationships. It does not pretend that another person is waiting for you or invent messages from your connections.

Your public page is never automatic

Creating or editing a profile does not publish it. Public publication is a separate off-by-default switch. You select the fields to show. Your account email, phone, birthdate, private account biography and access role are not included in the public projection. A Public post needs its own audience choice. Unpublishing removes access through Friends, but cannot retract copies already made outside the service. Search indexing is a separate choice.

What is recorded when you use Friends

The module stores first use, recent page activity and visit counts for people who actually enter Friends. It does not enroll or continuously scan all AckySHINE accounts. Only genuine page visits and visible, recently interacted-with pages update activity. Notification polling itself does not keep an idle account active. Activity is used for service delivery, opted-in matching and queue eligibility. Public presence is separately optional.

Manual AI tools

With your Private AI companion permission, your submitted request and selected volunteered Friends brand fields are sent to the centrally configured AI provider. This includes display name, headline, About, skills, interests, offers, goals, extra AI context you supplied and up to six recent private AI exchanges. Mediation history is excluded from other tools—not your entire account, financial modules or email inbox. Responses are private until you independently choose to use or publish their content.

Provider processing & uncertainty

Provider selection and explicit fallbacks are controlled by the AckySHINE administrator. Configured provider names and model IDs are shown in Privacy & AI. A failed request may already have transmitted the permitted context before a fallback is tried. Friends does not promise that a third-party provider offers zero retention or does not train on data; those protections depend on the administrator’s provider terms and settings. Do not submit secrets or confidential third-party information. AI suggestions may be wrong.

Connection suggestions

Matching runs locally on opted-in members’ volunteered skills and interests. It uses a bounded rotating sample of recently active discoverable members and explains shared terms. It does not infer health, ethnicity, religion, political beliefs, vulnerability or personality. Optional manual gender filtering is a separate voluntary disclosure and is never used by AI matching. Suggestions are not compatibility judgments, and no connection is accepted for you.

AI topics, comments, actions & autopost

An administrator may enable AI community topics/comments. Manual Assistant results are complete drafts: the member chooses an explicit Publish, Apply or Send button before any resulting action occurs. Personal AI autopost is a separate opt-in that also requires administrator enablement and background consent; it uses volunteered Friends profile fields plus a small sample of the member’s own recent non-private Friends posts, never private-chat content or private-audience posts, respects a 1–3 posts/week cap, publishes only to Members or Accepted Connections, and is clearly labeled AI-assisted. Members can delete their own AI-assisted autoposts.

Private conversations & mediation

Messages are stored for the participants; this is not end-to-end encrypted messaging. Ordinary browsing does not send chats to AI. Mediation requires both people’s general AI-chat permission and both per-conversation permissions. Only a bounded recent excerpt, sent after both consents, is eligible. Message-ID cutoffs also exclude messages sent earlier within the same clock second. Clearing either participant’s view excludes that cleared history from later mediation. Consent is checked again after generation. Private-chat mediation is manually requested; there is no autonomous private-chat surveillance in this release.

Reconnecting without intrusion

Opted-in reconnect suggestions use conversation timestamps rather than message contents. Eligible connections must be active, unblocked and opted in. A suggestion stays private to its recipient. You are never pressured to respond, and the assistant never silently messages another person.

Active members, quiet hours & reminders

Background work is limited to active, opted-in Friends participants, with small batches, scheduler backpressure at 500 outstanding jobs, cooldowns, a global provider-call budget and configurable quiet hours. Inactive accounts are skipped for AI work. A separate off-by-default email choice permits occasional reactivation reminders for members inactive for 30–180 days, at most once per 30 days. Generic invitation emails are separately optional. Quiet hours do not prevent manual AI requests.

Pause, revoke & retention

Pausing your background assistance does not disable your manual companion. Revocation is checked when jobs execute and after generation. Previously generated private AI history is retained for the administrator-selected period (default 90 days); you can delete your own history immediately. Cleanup runs with the worker. Consent/action logs are pruned after 180 days. Posts, messages, reports, notice history and basic participation records are retained until their relevant deletion or an administrator’s documented retention process; this release does not claim automatic account-erasure or guaranteed global deletion.

Blocking & reporting

Blocking prevents messaging, invitations and authenticated mutual visibility in Friends. A public web page remains accessible anonymously once you choose to publish it; a block cannot identify someone browsing signed out. A report shares the selected content snapshot and your explanation with authorized human moderators. Reporting a private message does not open the rest of the conversation to the moderation interface.

What “live” and “background” mean

Live counters and chat refresh work while the module is open and visible. This release does not install device push notifications or a permanent browser service. Scheduled assistance and emails require the server’s CLI cron runner. Opening a page does not start a 50,000-user scan or make a provider call.

You decide the next step