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: 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: Directly from myactivity.google.com/product/gemini, click the Turn off button located inside the Gemini Apps Activity card near the top of the screen. Selecting this will open a window where you can click Turn off (or choose Turn off and delete activity if you prefer to simultaneously wipe out your existing chat log). Once selected, a confirmation notice will pop up to outline how your data is handled going forward; simply scroll to the bottom of that window and click Pause to permanently stop Google from saving your future prompts and generations to your account. 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. Protecting your privacy doesn't mean you have to stay off these platforms. Taking ten minutes to lock down these settings means you can confidently use these tools to shrink your daily mental load, streamline your projects, and experiment with total peace of mind.