Using ChatGPT at work without leaking personal data
Last updated: 4 November 2026
Do not put personal data or confidential information in an AI chat unless your organization has approved that tool for it. Keep names, e-mail addresses, phone numbers and bank details out of prompts, use placeholders, and set shared rules so everyone applies them the same way.
What the GDPR asks
Personal data is any information about an identifiable person: a name, an e-mail address, a phone number, a customer number. Sending it to an outside service is processing. It needs a purpose, a legal basis and safeguards, and the people concerned must be informed. A quick copy and paste into a chat rarely meets these conditions. This guide is general information, not legal advice: ask your data protection officer about your own case.
What to keep out of prompts
- Names and contact details of customers, patients, candidates or colleagues.
- Bank details, card numbers, social security numbers.
- Credentials: passwords, API keys, tokens, private keys.
- Internal names your company treats as confidential: projects, clients, code names.
What to do instead
- Anonymize before you paste. Replace each value with a placeholder such as
[CUSTOMER_1]. The model can still rewrite, summarize or analyze the text. - Use the tools your organization approved, with the settings it chose (for example, no training on your conversations).
- Write the rules down: which tools, which data never goes in, who to ask when in doubt.
Setting rules for a team
Written rules help, but people forget them. PromptKit lets an administrator deploy keywords (client or project names), custom rules and minimum actions through the browser's managed policy, so the same checks run on every computer. It can lock protection on and block a message when a check cannot run. It never reports what people typed: nothing leaves the browser. See PromptKit for teams.
Limits to keep in mind
A tool that recognizes patterns cannot understand every sensitive sentence. It works on ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini in Chrome, Edge and Brave, not in other apps. It supports good habits; it does not replace them.