Sharing Data Safely with ChatGPT
One of the most common questions I get—whether from clients, peers, or even friends—is: “Is it safe to share this with ChatGPT?”
It’s a fair question. When you’re juggling sensitive projects, client data, or even personal research, you want to know what happens when you paste text into a chat window. Let’s walk through how I think about this, both from a practical security lens and from my own agency experience.
How ChatGPT Handles Your Data
- Conversations are private to you. Other users don’t see them.
- Your content isn’t used to retrain models. (Unless you’re using a specific opt-in playground or research program, which I don’t.)
- Enterprise and Team tiers have extra safeguards. That means SOC 2 compliance, encrypted storage, and admin controls—things most businesses expect of SaaS tools.
Put simply: what you share here is not being fed back into some public dataset. It stays within your account and, depending on your plan, under enterprise-grade compliance controls.
My Own Rule of Thumb
Even with those safeguards, I treat ChatGPT like I would any SaaS partner tool:
- I don’t paste client passwords, tokens, or raw PII.
- I’m comfortable sharing code, strategy docs, analytics exports, and transcripts because they’re the same kind of material I’d drop into Google Docs, Notion, or Slack.
- If something is truly contract-sensitive or regulated (like HIPAA or PCI data), I keep that out of ChatGPT and handle it in a secured workflow.
It’s about matching the tool to the data type.
Why I Use It Anyway
The upside of using ChatGPT for my work outweighs the risks when handled thoughtfully:
- It reduces frontal lobe weight by holding state across projects.
- I can run audits, code reviews, and summaries much faster than manually.
- It acts as a collaboration layer that doesn’t replace security hygiene, but complements it.
In agency life, this means I can deliver insights quicker, keep projects moving, and still honor the guardrails clients expect.
A Note on Trust
No system is perfectly “safe.” But most of the hesitation around AI tools comes from not knowing what happens under the hood. Once people understand that their chats aren’t public training fodder, and that enterprise controls exist, the conversation shifts from fear to good data hygiene practices.
That’s where I like to keep it:
- Know what’s sensitive.
- Know what’s safe to share.
- Use the tool for leverage, not as a dumping ground.
Quick FAQ on ChatGPT & Security
Q: Can OpenAI employees read my data?
A: No, your chats aren’t visible to other people, including employees, unless you explicitly share them for support/debugging.
Q: Does ChatGPT store my chats forever?
A: No. Chats are stored so you can access them, but retention and deletion policies depend on your account tier. Enterprise customers have stricter retention controls.
Q: Is my data used to train the model?
A: Not by default. Free, Plus, and Enterprise chats are not used for training unless you opt in to a feedback/research program.
Q: Is ChatGPT compliant with business security standards?
A: Enterprise and Team tiers are SOC 2 compliant, with encrypted storage and admin controls. Think of it as similar to how cloud services like Google Workspace or Slack handle data.
Q: What should I avoid pasting?
A: Anything you wouldn’t paste into email, Slack, or Google Docs: no raw passwords, API keys, or regulated medical/financial data.
Final Thought
For me, ChatGPT is part of the same toolkit as email, docs, and task boards. I wouldn’t paste a client’s bank details into any of those, and I don’t here either. But for the work that makes up 95% of my day—strategy, code, notes, transcripts—it’s safe, private, and a huge boost to productivity.
That’s the balance I strike: thoughtful boundaries, maximum utility.