What customer information not to paste into an AI tool

When you paste text into an AI tool, you send it to another company's computers. A newsletter draft doesn't need much customer detail, so the safest habit is to leave it out.

What happens to what you paste

The makers publish their own explanations. Both of the pages below were checked on 13 November 2026, and both can change, so read the current version for your plan.¹²

Start with ChatGPT. On a personal Free, Plus or Pro account, sharing your chats with OpenAI is the starting setting.¹ You switch it off under "Improve the model for everyone". Doing that leaves your saved chats where they are.¹ Stopping training and deleting a chat are two separate steps.

Business accounts differ. OpenAI says that by default it doesn't train on content from its Business, Enterprise, Edu or Healthcare workspaces.¹

Feedback buttons have their own rule. If you give a thumbs up or down, the whole conversation behind it may be used for training.¹

Anthropic, which makes Claude, publishes a similar page. It covers its consumer products such as Claude Free, Pro and Max, and sends business users to a separate page.² Incognito chats aren't used to improve Claude.² For feedback, it says it stores the entire related conversation.²

Other tools, and the AI features inside email platforms, have their own terms. Look for the maker's page like the two above. If you can't find a clear statement, assume the text may be kept.

What to keep out

The general principle comes from data protection guidance. The UK regulator says you shouldn't hold more personal data than you need for your purpose.³

It also says not to collect personal data just in case it's useful later.³ That guidance is about UK law. It's still a handy rule of thumb for any prompt: share only what the job needs.

For a newsletter, the job rarely needs any personal details. Keep these out of prompts:

• subscriber lists, or any export from your email platform;
• customers' names, email addresses, phone numbers and home addresses;
• order histories, account numbers and payment details;
• complaints or emails from named customers;
• health, financial or family details a customer told you in confidence;
• staff details, such as rosters, pay or personal circumstances;
• passwords, access keys and login links.

Don't paste these even to "tidy" or "sort" them. A tool that cleans a list has still received the list.

How to get the same help without the detail

Give the tool the shape of the task, not the people in it.

• Use placeholders such as [Customer first name] and [Product] and fill them in yourself later.
• Describe groups, not individuals: "customers who bought a mower last spring".
• Rewrite a real complaint as a general question: "How should a newsletter explain a delayed delivery?"
• Describe your own business facts freely, such as opening hours, new products and events. They're yours to share, though check anything you've promised a supplier to keep private.

Settings and plans

If you do paste business material, check the settings first. Find the data controls in the tool, see whether your plan uses chats for training, and turn that off if you can. That switch leaves saved chats in place.¹

Check whether your customers were told their details might go to outside services. Your privacy policy and your local privacy regulator are the places to look. This page isn't legal advice.

When in doubt, leave it out. You can draft a newsletter from notes about your business alone. How to build a brief with no customers in it is covered elsewhere. Consent and sender rules are a separate matter, listed in the regulators' pages.