Glossary
Personal data
Personal data is any information that relates to an identifiable person: a name, email, phone number, photo, address, even an IP address. Under the GDPR it gets special protection, which matters every time you paste real details into an AI chatbot.
“Personal data” sounds abstract until you notice how much of it passes through your hands every day. Legally (the definition comes from the GDPR) it’s any information relating to an identified or identifiable person. Names and emails, obviously, but also a customer’s address, a photo, an order history, a license plate.
Some categories get extra protection: health, religion, political opinions, sexual orientation. The GDPR calls these special categories, and the rules around them are stricter.
Now the everyday part. A bar owner pasting a client’s complaint email into a chatbot to draft a reply is handing personal data to an AI provider. That’s not automatically forbidden, but it does mean privacy rules apply to her, not just to the AI company. The lightweight habit that solves most of it: swap real names and contacts for placeholders before you paste (anonymization in its simplest form). Our paste checker helps you judge what’s safe to paste where.
Where you’ll meet this
- Privacy policies of ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini, which all have sections on personal data
- GDPR consent banners and privacy notices on virtually every European website
- Your own customer records, if you run any kind of business