How to hide your sensitive info (for real) when using ChatGPT and other AI chatbots |
How to hide your sensitive info (for real) when using ChatGPT and other AI chatbots
There’s a right way, and a wrong way. Don’t choose the wrong way.
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Like many, I’ve never met a chatbot I trust completely. Not only do they have a propensity to hallucinate by making up facts, but you can never be sure what their parent companies do with the information you provide. Most AI companies say they use your data to further train their models, but anonymize it first. However, you just have to take them at their word on this.
Still, chatbots can be useful for summarizing and explaining complicated information, such as the kind contained in many bank statements, medical reports, and mortgage contracts.
So if you do choose to upload sensitive documents like this, you should take steps to redact as much personal information as possible, not only to protect your privacy from the AI company but also to hedge against future data breaches that could cause your financial and medical records to be spilled across the dark web. Here’s how.
The wrong way to redact your sensitive data
First things first: There’s a right and a wrong way to redact sensitive information, particularly from PDFs, which are the format most of our bank statements, medical records, and contracts come in. As some attorneys general and lawyers have learned the hard way, redacting PDFs the wrong way essentially provides no protection at all.
The “wrong” way is to use a PDF reader’s markup tools, like the pen or highlighter, to scribble out or draw black bars across text. While these methods may hide text to the naked eye, a simple mouse move across the obscured line of text to select it, followed by a copy-and-paste, can often recover it. More advanced PDF tools can also easily remove any digital pen scratches and black highlights entirely, revealing the original text underneath.
In short, the “wrong” way is akin to placing a piece of electrical tape over the lines of a document: it obscures the lines from view, but it can easily be peeled off. So, if you are using this redaction method before uploading your sensitive documents to ChatGPT, your instinct is in the right place, but your execution is off—and that leaves your sensitive personally identifiable information highly vulnerable.
The right way to redact your sensitive information before uploading documents to AI chatbots
The correct way to digitally redact documents is to use a tool specifically designed to destroy underlying data within the PDF’s internal code. These redaction tools literally get rid of the underlying text, making it nearly impossible to recover.
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