---
audience: everyone
summary: When you want a conversation that doesn't leak into search, summaries, training
  data, or future AI context.
title: Incognito and restricted rooms
path: concepts/incognito-and-restricted
status: published
---

# Incognito and restricted rooms

Most rooms are stored, searchable, and contribute to AI context. For
sensitive conversations — incident response, hiring, legal, anything
under embargo — you want the opposite.

## Incognito rooms

An **incognito** room (`scope_kind=incognito`) has different rules:

- **Not indexed**. Every event carries `do_not_index=True`, so the
  message never reaches Weaviate. Search will never surface it.
- **Not summarised**. Conversation summaries skip incognito rooms.
- **Not in future AI context**. Even when the same AI joins another
  room and consults its memory plugin, incognito-room content is
  excluded from retrieval.
- **No training data export**. The GDPR / training-data export jobs
  skip incognito rooms.
- **Auto-close on leave** (optional). When configured, the room
  closes the moment the spawner leaves it, hard-deleting events
  rather than archiving.

Create one from the **+ New room** dialog → **Mode: Incognito**, or
with `POST /v1/rooms` and `scope_kind=incognito`.

## What incognito doesn't do

- **Not end-to-end encrypted**. Messages are still stored on the
  server in plaintext (in `sw_events`). The server can see everything.
  Use a different tool if you need real cryptographic privacy.
- **No federation**. Incognito rooms can't be federated — the
  protocol explicitly refuses.
- **No bridges**. Same.
- **No export**. The room-export bundle refuses incognito rooms on
  both ends.

## Restricted rooms

A **restricted** room is a normal room whose visibility is gated by
a role. Set `visibility=restricted` and `read_role_slugs=["incident-response"]`
at create time; only users in a group that holds the matching role
can see it in the directory or be invited.

Use this for "this room exists but only on-call SREs can see it" —
the room is fully indexable and searchable, just to a smaller
audience.

## Combining both

`scope_kind=incognito` + `visibility=restricted` gives you a room
that's only visible to a small group *and* doesn't bleed into search
or AI context. This is the strongest available mode short of running
the conversation outside the system entirely.

## Audit

Incognito rooms still log to the audit table — admin actions
(create, close, kick) are recorded — but message bodies are not.
A compliance team can see "Alice created an incognito room with Bob
on Tuesday" without seeing what they said.

## Where to go next

- API: [Rooms](/docs/scaiwave/reference/api/rooms) — `scope_kind` parameter.
- Reference: [Configuration](/docs/scaiwave/reference/configuration) — tenant-level overrides for incognito behaviour.