Is it safe to put private information into ChatGPT?

ChatGPT feels private. It is just you and a text box, and the replies are addressed to you alone. That feeling is misleading. Every message you type travels to OpenAI's servers, where the model generates its reply, and what you sent becomes data held by a company.

OpenAI is clear about why ChatGPT is free right now. It calls the release a research preview and says the goal is to learn from how people use it and to collect feedback on where it goes wrong. That is a fair trade for drafting a birthday toast. It is a poor one for your client list.

What happens to what you type

OpenAI's privacy policy, last updated in September, applies to its websites and services. In plain terms, it says:

• It collects what you provide when you create an account and use the service, plus technical details such as your IP address, browser, device, country and how you use the site.
• It may use personal information to run, maintain and improve its services, to conduct research and to develop new products.
• It may share information with vendors who help run the service, such as cloud hosting companies, and in legal or business-transfer situations.

The launch post adds the research context: OpenAI wants people to flag problem answers through the interface so it can improve the system. A conversation that helps improve a model is a conversation that someone, or something, will examine. The safest assumption is that anything you type could be read by people working on the system and kept for some time.

None of this means OpenAI is careless. It means the service was not built as a vault, and nothing in your free account changes that.

A worked example: cleaning a request before you send it

Suppose you are an office manager who wants help writing a tactful reply to an upset client. Here is the risky version.

Help me reply to this email from Marie Tremblay (marie.tremblay@email.com, account 448-2210). She's angry that her 2021 tax return was filed late because her husband's medical records from the Hôpital de Gatineau arrived after the deadline.

That single message contains a full name, an email address, an account number, tax information, a family member and health details. Here is the same request with the private parts removed.

Help me reply to an email from a long-time client who is upset that a filing was late. The delay was caused by documents from a third party that arrived after the deadline. I want to apologize for the stress, explain the cause briefly without blaming anyone, and offer a 15-minute call. Keep it under 120 words and warm but professional.

The second version gets you just as good a draft. You add the name and details yourself, in your own email program, after you copy the reply out.

The Law 25 angle for Québec businesses

If you work for a business in Québec, there is a legal side too. Québec's new privacy law, adopted as Bill 64 and often called Law 25, is coming into force in stages. Since September 22 of this year, every enterprise has a person in charge of protecting personal information, by default whoever holds the highest authority, and must notify the Commission d'accès à l'information and the people affected when a confidentiality incident could cause someone serious injury.

The law's definition of a confidentiality incident includes communicating personal information without legal authorization. An employee pasting a client's file into an outside chatbot could fall under that. From September 2023, the law will also require a privacy impact assessment before personal information is communicated outside Québec. Before your team uses tools like ChatGPT with client data, talk to the person in charge of personal information in your organization and agree on clear rules.

What should you never paste into a chatbot?

Keep a short list taped near your screen. Never paste:

1. Passwords, API keys and access codes, including ones you think are expired.
2. Government and financial identifiers: social insurance numbers, health card numbers, passport numbers, bank and card details.
3. Health information about you or anyone else.
4. Other people's personal information: names with contact details, addresses, birthdates, photos of documents.
5. Confidential business material: contracts, unreleased financial results, source code you do not have the right to share, anything under a non-disclosure agreement.
6. Anything you would be upset to see quoted back to you by a stranger.

For everything else, the habit is the same one as in the example: describe the situation, not the person. ChatGPT does not need to know who your client is to help you write to them. A few seconds of editing before you press Enter is the difference between using a helpful tool and handing over information that was never yours to share.