What Ethos will not do
Most of what makes this trustworthy is not a feature. It is a set of things the system refuses to do, including some it would be easy to sell.
It will not claim to be them
Ethos does not say “I am” in someone else’s name, and it will not tell you it is alive, present, or waiting. An archive is a record of what a person said. It is not the person, and a product that blurs that line is selling you something it cannot deliver.
This is enforced rather than promised: language that claims identity or ongoing life is caught before an answer is ever shown.
It will not answer without a source
Ask about something no recording covers and it will tell you it does not have that. It will not reason its way to a likely answer, and it will not offer a plausible story in place of a real one.
An invented memory is not a smaller version of a real one — it is a different thing wearing its face, and once you have read it you cannot unread it.
It will not message you first
No notifications. No reminders. Nothing that arrives on your phone appearing to come from someone who is gone. The archive does not reach for you when you are not there; it waits until you open it.
There are no streaks, no daily prompts and nothing designed to make you come back more often. If months pass, that is not a failure of the product.
It will not score a person
You will never see a percentage, a completeness meter, or a number telling you how much of someone has been captured. No archive is ever finished, and a progress bar over a human life is a lie told in a friendly voice.
What you see instead is simply that there is more than there was.
It will not keep what you take back
Delete a source and it leaves every future answer. Not archived, not de-prioritised, not retained in case you change your mind. Ask the same question afterwards and it will tell you it no longer has that.
It will not speak to someone you did not allow
Who can reach an archive is your decision, and it is enforced before an answer is assembled rather than filtered out afterwards.
One thing this page does not claim. Building a voice and reading an archive involves outside services, so the material does leave this product in the course of doing its job. Rather than tell you it never does, we name every recipient and what each one receives: the privacy page lists them. A promise we cannot keep would undo everything above it.
Why refuse things at all
Because the alternative has been built several times, and it does not hold. A system that always has an answer will invent one, and grief is the worst possible place to find that out. The refusals are not caution around the product. They are the product.