How to Use AI Without Letting It Train on Your Personal Data
One of the biggest concerns we hear from women joining FAIR HIVE is a lack of trust around data privacy. It's easy to feel hesitant about using AI when the terms of service make it seem like everything you type is being fed right back into a public model.
If you want to use these tools safely while balancing your regular projects, you don't have to wait for corporate privacy policies to change. You can protect your data right now by updating a few basic settings.
Here's a quick checklist to secure your data across the major platforms:
- ChatGPT: Go to Settings → Data Controls and turn off "Improve the model for everyone." For anything sensitive, use a Temporary Chat, which isn't saved to your history or used for training.
- Claude: As of 2025, Claude trains on Free, Pro, and Max chats by default, so you need to opt out. Go to Settings → Privacy and turn off the model-improvement setting. Opting out also shortens how long your chats are kept. (Note: conversations flagged for safety review may still be used for training.)
- Gemini: Go to your activity settings (myactivity.google.com → Gemini Apps Activity) and turn it off to stop your prompts from being saved, reviewed by humans, or used for training. Keep in mind this also turns off your chat history, and Google may retain chats for up to 72 hours. For one-off sensitive prompts, use a Temporary Chat instead.
Taking ten minutes to lock down these settings lets you experiment freely without worrying about your privacy.
Teaching this kind of practical AI literacy is exactly why we built our community. To help women navigate these setups safely, we put our core operational frameworks into The FAIR HIVE AI for Productivity Course. We also have a plug-and-play guide called The Soft Life AI Tools that focuses on setting up clean, secure automations around a day job.
For the women here: has data privacy been holding you back from using these tools more consistently? How are you keeping your information secure?