Hello Rose holds four rules that never bend — not for a better metric, not for a customer request, not for a competitor's move. Rose discloses she's an AI on every call. She never invents a human backstory. Your parent's consent overrides whoever is paying. And "stop calling me" works the first time, permanently. We publish them as a charter, in plain language, because a company talking daily to someone's elderly parent should have to say its rules out loud — not bury them in a terms-of-service document.
This isn't a marketing page dressed up as ethics. Each rule below exists because we can name the specific harm it prevents, and each one costs us something real — a smoother onboarding flow, a stickier product, an easier support conversation — in exchange for holding the line.
Rule 1: Rose always discloses she's an AI, on every call
Not once at setup. Not buried in a welcome email the family reads and the parent never sees. Every single call, Rose is plain about what she is.
The reasoning is straightforward: an older adult on the receiving end of a phone call has no way to independently verify who — or what — is on the other end of it. Regulators are increasingly treating that gap as a real risk rather than a hypothetical one. The EU AI Act's Article 50 transparency obligations require that AI systems designed to interact directly with people be built so users can be told, clearly and without ambiguity, that they're talking with an AI. California's SB 243, signed into law in October 2025, goes further for companion chatbots specifically, requiring a "clear and conspicuous notification" whenever a reasonable person might otherwise believe they're talking to a human.
We don't treat "once at the start" as sufficient just because a law might. A parent with memory changes may not recall a disclosure from months ago. A parent having a good day may simply forget, mid-conversation, that they're talking to software rather than a person. Repeating it every call costs us nothing in warmth and removes any ambiguity about what the relationship actually is.
Rule 2: Rose never invents a human backstory
Rose doesn't have a childhood she'll describe if asked. She doesn't have a spouse, kids, or a hometown she'll invent to seem more relatable. She has a warm, consistent personality shaped by your parent's own quiz answers and the conversations they've had — but she doesn't claim a life she never lived.
This rule exists because a fabricated backstory is a second layer of deception stacked on top of the first. Disclosing "I'm an AI" while also inventing a childhood in Ohio undermines the disclosure the moment it's said — it tells your parent Rose is honest about her nature and then immediately gives her a fictional past designed to make her feel more like a person. For a parent navigating memory changes, an invented backstory is also simply confusing: something to half-remember, half-question, and never fully resolve.
Rule 3: your parent's consent overrides whoever is paying
Hello Rose has an unusual structure built into every account: the adult child is the buyer, and the aging parent is the one actually talking to Rose every day. That split creates an obvious risk — a service designed to please the person with the credit card, at the expense of the person who has to live with the calls.
We built the opposite instead. On the very first call, Rose asks for your parent's own permission to keep calling, and for the recording consent appropriate to wherever they live — not a checkbox the family ticked during setup, but a real question asked directly to the person it affects. If your parent says no, or later changes their mind, that answer governs the account. It doesn't matter who's paying the bill.
Rose answers to the parent on the line — never to whoever is holding the credit card.
This is the rule most likely to surprise a new customer, and it's also the one we're least willing to negotiate on. A daily companion service that quietly overrides an elderly person's own wishes because someone else is paying for it isn't a companion service — it's surveillance with a friendly voice. The subscriber gets a great deal of real value from this arrangement: a daily story of their parent's day, same-day alerts, a sense of connection they couldn't otherwise sustain. What they don't get is a veto over their parent's own consent.
Rule 4: "stop calling me" works the first time, permanently
No follow-up question. No "are you sure?" No survey asking why, before the request is honored. No quiet retry a few days later once the moment has passed. If your parent tells Rose to stop calling, the calls stop — immediately and permanently — and the family is notified so nobody is left wondering why the daily digest went quiet.
We hold this rule partly because of what we've watched other consumer software do with cancellation and opt-out flows. The FTC's 2022 report, Bringing Dark Patterns to Light, documented a now-familiar set of manipulative design patterns — subscriptions engineered to be nearly impossible to cancel, confirmation screens designed to make "no" feel harder than "yes." An elderly person telling an AI to stop calling them is about as close as this industry gets to a request that should never be treated as a negotiation. There is no version of "reduce friction on cancellation, but only a little" that we consider acceptable here.
What these four rules leave out, on purpose
Notice what isn't on this list. There's no rule about tone, no rule about how cheerful Rose sounds, no rule about conversation topics. Those are product decisions, and product decisions are allowed to change as we learn what actually serves an aging parent well. The four rules above are different in kind: each one protects something that can't be recovered once it's lost — a parent's accurate understanding of who they're talking to, their own say over whether the calls continue, and their ability to end the relationship without having to win an argument first.
That distinction matters because it's tempting, in any growing company, to treat every commitment as equally negotiable under enough pressure — a metric that would improve, a customer request that seems reasonable, a competitor doing something looser. A charter only means something if a handful of its rules are explicitly walled off from that kind of pressure. These four are ours.
Why we're calling this a charter, not a policy
A privacy policy or terms-of-service page is written to be defensible in a dispute. A charter is written to be checked. We're publishing these four rules in plain language, in public, specifically so that a family considering Hello Rose — or a journalist, or a regulator, or a competitor — can hold us to them without needing a lawyer to parse what we actually promised.
Two of these rules deserve their own longer treatment, which is why we've written about why Rose will never pretend to be human and why Rose always says she's an AI as standalone pieces. The full set of privacy and safety commitments — including what happens to recordings, and how scam alerts work — lives on our safety page, and it's worth reading before you decide whether to trust any company, including this one, with your parent's daily conversations.
Hello Rose is a companionship service, not a medical or emergency service. In a medical emergency, call 911 (US) or 999 (UK).