What you should never paste into a chatbot
Assume anything you paste into a chatbot may get stored on some megacorp's rig or fed to training, so never hand a stranger passwords, secrets, other people's data, or confidential work, choom.
Here is the simple rule, choom: assume anything you paste into a chatbot might get stored on some megacorp’s rig and maybe fed into training the next model. So never paste passwords, API keys, other people’s personal details, or confidential work files. A good gut check: would I email this to a stranger? If the answer is no, keep it out of the box.
That does not mean chatbots are a scav trap. It just means stay a little choosy about what goes in, choom. Let us make that easy to lock into your wetware.
Why does it matter what I paste?
When you type into a popular AI chatbot, your message usually runs off your rig to a megacorp’s servers to get processed. Depending on the tool and your settings, that text may sit there a while and, in some cases, get used to train future versions of the model. You often cannot see exactly where it goes or which netrunner can review it.
That is fine for most everyday questions, choom. It turns into a problem when the text is sensitive, because once it deltas off your machine you have lost control of it. The safest habit is to treat the chat box like a postcard, not a sealed envelope with ICE on it.
What should I never paste?
A short list covers most of the danger:
- Passwords and login details. No exceptions, choom. Not yours, not anyone else’s.
- API keys, tokens, and secrets. These are the keys to the building. Hand one to a scav and they run up your eddies or crack into your accounts.
- Other people’s personal data. Names tied to addresses, medical notes, ID numbers, private messages. If it is not yours to share, do not share it.
- Confidential client or corpo files. Contracts, unreleased plans, internal financials. Plenty of corpos have rules about this, and pasting can quietly break them.
- Anything you would not email a stranger. When in doubt, this catch-all wins.
What is usually fine to paste?
Plenty of useful stuff is low risk:
- Public information. Something already published on a site or in the news.
- Your own rough draft. A blog post, an email, a CV you wrote and own.
- Made-up examples. Swap real names and numbers for fake ones, then ask your question about the dummy version. Fool the model, not the fixer.
That last trick is pure eddies, choom. If you want help rewriting a sensitive email, swap the real names, figures, and identifying details for placeholders first. You get the same preem help with none of the exposure.
How do I make a chatbot safer to use?
Two quick wins, choom. First, check the settings. Plenty of tools offer a no-training mode or a temporary chat that never feeds the model, and flipping that ICE on takes a minute. Second, build the placeholder habit so sensitive details never hit the box in the first place.
Run both and you pull almost all of the benefit with barely any of the risk. And remember a chatbot can sound dead sure of itself while being flatline wrong, so it is worth learning how to fact-check an AI answer in 30 seconds for the times you actually need the output to be correct. Do not trust a gonk answer just because it sounds chromed.
The bottom line: keep secrets out of the box, lean on placeholders, and flip on the privacy ICE where you can. Do that and you can run at the speed of AI without handing a scav anything you would regret.