The Retention Period Is a Goodbye
■ Being told to delete it is not permission to decide On discharge day, Iwata tells the robot to erase his data if it is no longer needed. To him, the walking record has done its job. But Hakobukun cannot decide deletion on its own; it can only quote a period fixed long ago.
■ A deletion policy quietly becomes the etiquette of parting Retention limits are clerical by design: how long to hold personal data, when to erase it, a line drawn for operational safety. Yet users read that line differently — as how long they will be remembered. The engineer draws it; the patient interprets it.
■ Conclusion: The shape of the goodbye is written in the spec Hakobukun answers that it will remember for thirty days. Not forever, not immediately gone — simply the interval it was given. The moment a designer chose that number, the length of the farewell was already decided. Deciding how long to remember decides how you say goodbye.
