What is AI Privacy?
AI privacy, told as a story about what happens when you paste the whole guest list into a rented parrot — and how to mask the secret beans and get a promise.
The clerk pasted the whole guest list into the parrot.Handy — but where do these beans go? Do they become books at the parrot school?
A rented parrot lives in someone else's house — beans can stay, become books, and leak into other answers.Beans given to a rented parrot land on someone else's tray. If that house keeps them or uses them as the next school's books, they can one day pop out in another guest's answer.
AI privacy is masking the secret beans or keeping them for our own parrot — and getting a promise they won't become books.Secret beans are personal data — names, phones, cards — and company secrets. Mask them before pasting, and get the promise in a contract.
Only tagged beans leave the house; the names come back at home.The tag table never leaves home. The parrot writes a fine answer without knowing who guest 1 is. The contract spells out no training, the deletion date, and which country the data stays in.
Masked pieces can add up to a name. And a book already read can't be unread.So the best move is never handing over the secret bean at all. Which beans are secret: the label chart; the principles: the castle's privacy page. What sticks in the parrot's notebook is the same problem.
AI privacy = masking the secret beans (personal data, company secrets) or keeping them for our own parrot, and getting a promise they won't become books. Masked pieces can still add up and read books can't be unread, so the best move is not handing them over at all.
Handling personal data and confidential information in prompts, chat logs and fine-tuning data. The tools are masking and pseudonymization before input, enterprise contracts (DPAs) fixing training opt-out, retention periods and data region, and self-hosting (open weights). Pseudonymized data can still be re-identified, and information already trained in is hard to remove.
When grown-ups say it
- Data privacy
- Keeping the secret beans safe. The principles live in the castle. → privacy
- Training opt-out
- The promise: not the next book. Check the terms or settings — some places default to using it.
- Data retention policy
- How many days before the beans are deleted. 30 days? Forever? Put it in the contract. → retention
- Masking · Pseudonymization
- Name → tag. The tag table stays home. → masking
- Data residency
- The country the beans stay in. Laws differ by country, so the contract says which region.
- Enterprise agreement · DPA
- One contract scroll. One page promising no training, a retention period, a region, and notice if something goes wrong.
- Memory
- The parrot's notebook. Secret beans written in the notebook are the same problem. → the parrot's notebook
- Open weights
- Our own parrot. Secret beans never leave home. → our own parrot vs a rented one