Lesson 223 · 2 min

Data privacy at work

Before you paste work data into an AI tool, check what your company allows and remove personal and confidential details.

Pasting a customer list or a contract into a free chatbot can share that data with a company outside your own. Depending on the tool and settings, it may be stored or used to improve the service.

Ask your company which AI tools are approved and for what kinds of data. Business versions often have stronger privacy terms. If there is no policy, ask for one, and be cautious until then.

Before pasting, remove or replace names, phone numbers, ID numbers, bank details, salaries and anything marked confidential. "Customer A" works just as well for most tasks.

Vietnam, like many countries, has rules on handling personal data. Your company's legal or HR team can tell you what applies to your work.

Do it now

Practise a clean paste

  1. 1. Take a real document you might want help with.
  2. 2. Replace every name, number and private detail with a placeholder.
  3. 3. Use the prompt below to check you did not miss anything.
Before I use this text with an AI tool, find any personal or sensitive details I should remove: names, phone numbers, emails, ID or bank numbers, addresses, salaries, health information or anything that looks confidential. List them; do not repeat the full text.

[PASTE TEXT WITH WHAT YOU ALREADY REMOVED]

Quick check

Your manager asks you to analyse a file of customer phone numbers and purchases. What should you do first?

Your manager asks you to analyse a file of customer phone numbers and purchases. What should you do first?

More on this

Words from this lesson

Data privacy
Keeping personal or confidential information under control, including deciding what you type into AI tools and where it is stored.
Training data
The examples, such as text, images or recordings, that a model learns its patterns from.