Private Writing AssistantIs it safe to paste confidential text into an AI tool?
It depends on three things about the tool, where it processes your text, whether it keeps it and whether it uses it for training, and on your organization's rules. If you can't confirm all of them, treat the text as shared. A tool that runs on your device takes the first three questions off the table.
What counts as confidential
More than you might think. Client names and details, anything about a colleague's health, pay or performance, unannounced plans, contract terms, prices you negotiated, internal numbers, and of course passwords and access codes. Text about other people is the most sensitive kind: in many countries, personal data comes with legal duties, however harmless the sentence looks.
Four questions to ask before you paste
- Where is the text processed? On your device, or on the provider's servers, and in which country?
- Is it stored? For how long, and can anyone at the provider read it?
- Is it used for training or product improvement? Is that on by default, and does it apply to your plan?
- Who else handles it? Many AI tools pass text on to another company's model. Their policy matters too.
The answers are in the tool's privacy policy and settings. If they're vague, or spread across five documents, that's an answer as well.
Your organization's rules come first
Many organizations keep a list of approved tools, and some forbid putting work text into any outside service. A tool with a good privacy policy can still be off-limits, and breaking the rule is a problem even if nothing leaks. If you're not sure, ask before you paste, not after.
Paste less
Whatever tool you use, the safest text is the text you never pasted. Before asking for help with a sentence, take out what the tool doesn't need to see.
Make this kinder: “Tom Becker's sick leave since 3 March has delayed the Hartmann contract.”
Make this kinder: “A team member's absence has delayed the contract.”
The tool can improve the tone just as well, and you add the names back yourself. Do the same with numbers, addresses and anything that identifies a person or a client.
When the tool runs on your device
With an on-device tool, the first three questions answer themselves: the text is processed on your computer, there's no copy on a server to store, and nothing is sent that could be used for training.
Private Writing Assistant works this way. Checking and rewriting run on your computer with Chrome Built-in AI, and what you write on websites is never sent to us or to an AI service, nor used to train any model. That doesn't replace your organization's rules, and whether it meets them is for your organization to decide. But it removes the question of what a server does with your text. The privacy policy lists the two things that can leave your device, neither of which contains your text.
Add Private Writing Assistant to Chrome to check and rewrite confidential text without sending it anywhere. How it works shows each step.
