Why You Should Be Careful What You Share With AI And How To Protect Your Privacy

TABLE OF CONTENTS

1. What Happens To Your Data When You Use AI?
2. The Biggest AI Data Privacy Risks To Know About
3. What Information Should You Never Share With AI?
4. How To Protect Your Privacy When Using AI
5. How To Decide Whether An AI Tool Is Trustworthy
6. Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

Whenever I enter a prompt into an AI tool I wonder, can I trust AI? Just because our chats with AI look private, doesn’t mean they are. Every prompt entered into a large language model (LLM) can potentially be used to train AI models like ChatGPT and Gemini and stored on the vendor’s servers, where it is exposed to human evaluators.

As a reporter, the privacy concerns are significant, and there have been multiple instances of “private” chats with AI being leaked to third parties. For instance, back in 2025, a security researcher found over 143,000 conversations with tools like Claude, Copilot and ChatGPT accessible on Archive.org. More recently, in July, the BBC reported that hundreds of user conversations with Claude were exposed on the public internet, with links to the chats readily available on Google.

Each of these outbreaks highlight that we shouldn’t trust AI to protect our data. Even if you configure privacy settings to shield your data, we ultimately have no guarantees that blackbox AI developers keep our information from exposure. While exposure of our information can’t be eliminated completely, there are some steps we can take to protect our privacy online when using AI tools.

What Happens To Your Data When You Use AI?

AI tools gather data from a range of sources. According to OpenAI, its foundation models are developed from a mix of information from the public internet, data gathered from third parties and information that users, human trainers and researchers provide or generate.

The Biggest AI Data Privacy Risks To Know About

As a general rule of thumb, any conversation that you have with an LLM should be considered as exposed to a third party.