Before You Paste That…

These tools are great for drafting an email, cleaning up a message, or making sense of a confusing letter. But every time you paste something in, it leaves your device and lands on a company's servers. Depending on the settings, it can be stored or used to train the next version. That's not a reason to stay away. It's a reason to build one small habit.

Here's the whole habit in one question. Before you paste anything, ask: would I be upset if this showed up on a public website tomorrow? If yes, don't paste it as-is. That one question covers most of what you'll ever run into.

Fine to paste:

• Public info and general questions.
• Your own drafts you already plan to share.
• A real problem, described in general terms, with the names and numbers taken out.

Never paste:

• A full name next to an ID number, passport, or license.
• Passwords, PINs, or bank login details.
• Medical details tied to your name.
• Photos of ID cards, credit cards, anything showing an account number.
• A kid's full name, school, and daily schedule together. That combo is enough to find them.

If you run a shop, a few more get a hard line: customer lists, financial records, and any contract with real names on it. Same for anything under an NDA. "I just wanted it to check the wording" isn't an exception anyone accepts.

So how do you still get the help? The placeholder trick. Before you paste, swap the real details for blanks: [Client Name], [Amount], [Date]. Let it draft, organize, and reword. Then you put the real details back in yourself, on your own screen, after. You keep all the usefulness and give up almost none of the safety.

Two settings worth two minutes. Most of the big apps have a switch to stop your chats from training future versions. Find it, turn it on. And a free tool usually assumes it can use whatever you type, unless you've said otherwise.

For the kids, keep it short. Talk to it like a friendly stranger. Homework help, fine. Sharing photos or your address, no.

That's the whole thing. No software, no course. Just a five-second scan before you hit enter: any names, any numbers, anything you wouldn't say out loud to a stranger? Swap it or drop it, then paste.

Want this set up properly for your business, so your team gets the help without the leaks? That's what I do here in Chicago. Let's talk.