Principles › How Porcupine coaches
How Porcupine coaches
What’s private stays private
What you tell Porcupine privately is yours. The other person sees it only if you say so.
For example
Porcupine · a tipSomething you told me privately could help Sam understand. Want to add it, or keep it private?
How Porcupine uses it
- The other person never sees your raw words, only the version you approve.
- Private notes, your answers to Porcupine’s questions and messages you paste in are for its understanding only.
- If a private detail would help, Porcupine asks before including it, and remembers a no.
- Anything you both see is built only from what you’ve both seen. Your private tips use only your own private context.
- Porcupine’s AI reads what you write so it can help you. The privacy policy says how that’s handled.
Why it helps
People tend to share more when they trust that what they say stays put, and a broken confidence is hard to repair. Mediators are bound to confidentiality for exactly this reason, and research on privacy describes how sharing something makes the listener a co-owner of it, with rules to keep. Porcupine only works if you can be honest with it. So your raw words, notes and private tips stay with you, and anything private reaches the other person only with your yes.
What we don’t know yet
The research on confidentiality and openness mostly comes from surveys rather than personal conversations.
The research
From practice
Professional standards for mediators require confidentiality: what the parties share isn’t passed on unless they agree or the law requires it.
Theory
Communication privacy management theory: sharing something private makes the listener a co-owner of it, with rules about where it goes, and broken rules damage trust.
More research
Studied with adults in general
A review of survey experiments found that a promise of confidentiality made people somewhat more willing to answer, but only when the questions were sensitive.
Library last updated October 2026.