Glossary
Confidential data
Confidential data is information you're obliged to keep restricted: client lists, contracts, financials, health records, trade secrets, passwords. It's the category to pause on before pasting anything into an AI chatbot, especially on a personal account.
Confidential data overlaps with personal data but isn’t the same thing. Personal data is about identifiable people; confidential data is anything you’ve promised, by law, contract or common sense, to keep restricted. A client list is both. A secret recipe or unreleased price list is confidential without being personal. Passwords and API keys are confidential, full stop.
The chatbot question is concrete: a bar owner negotiating with a new supplier wants help comparing two contracts. Pasting them whole into a personal chatbot account means contract terms covered by a confidentiality clause now sit on a third party’s servers, possibly feeding training data, retained for a while even after deletion.
The calm middle path: you rarely need the confidential parts for the AI to help. Describe the situation (“supplier A offers X% discount with 12-month lock-in, supplier B…”); strip names and figures that identify anyone, or use a business plan where data isn’t trained on. Three categories deserve a hard “never paste”: credentials, other people’s health or financial records, and anything under an NDA. For everything else, the paste checker gives you a verdict per chatbot and plan.
Where you’ll meet this
- NDAs and confidentiality clauses in your contracts
- Company AI policies, which usually list what counts as confidential
- Document labels like “internal”, “restricted” or “confidential”