memory-forgetting-policylisted

# Memory forgetting policy Systems that never forget become wrong: they act on circumstances that changed years ago and hold data long past any justification. Forgetting is a designed capability rather than an absence of retention. ## Method 1. **Give every memory type a lifetime.** Preferences may persist, project context should not outlive the project, and transient observations expire quickly. 2. **Decay by relevance as well as age.** A fact never retrieved and never confirmed is a candidate for removal regardless of how recently it was written. 3. **Make explicit deletion complete and immediate.** A user asking to forget something must see it removed from every store including derived summaries and indexes (see right-to-erasure). 4. **Distinguish forgetting from suppression.** Hiding a memory while retaining it is not deletion, and the difference matters legally as well as ethically. 5. **Handle consolidated memories carefully.** A fact merged into an abstraction cannot be deleted by removing the source record, which makes provenance essential (see memory-consolidation). 6. **Confirm what was forgotten.** Users need to know the request took effect, and a silent deletion is indistinguishable from being ignored. 7. **Log deletions without retaining the deleted content.** The record that a deletion occurred is what proves compliance, and it must not defeat the deletion. ## Boundaries Forgetting policies must satisfy legal retention