Unit 5 · How you know it's right
What you are actually allowed to put in
The principle
Whether you may paste something is settled by four checkable facts — the class of the data, the account it goes to, who can retrieve it later, and how long it is kept — not by how sensitive the document feels.
By the end: You can classify any document you hold as paste, redact, or refuse, and name which of the four questions decided it.
The situation
It is Wednesday. A colleague forwards you forty exit-interview transcripts and asks for the themes by Friday. You know your organisation has an AI policy. You read the first page of it in March.
So you do one of two things, and both are guesses. You paste the file, get your themes in four minutes, and quietly do not mention which tool you used. Or you decide it feels too sensitive, spend two evenings reading transcripts by hand, and produce a worse answer. Neither decision was reasoned. Both were mood.
Neither guess got faster with practice. What replaces the guess is four questions you can answer in a minute.
The principle
Whether you may paste something is settled by four checkable facts — the class of the data, the account it goes to, who can retrieve it later, and how long it is kept — not by how sensitive the document feels.
What class is it? Public, internal, confidential, or personal. Personal is the class people misfile most: anything about an identifiable human being — names, contact details, salary, performance, health, disciplinary records — carries obligations that internal commercial data does not.
Which account is this going to? A personal consumer login and your employer's licensed workspace are different destinations under different contracts. The interface looks identical. The answer is not.
Who can retrieve it later? Everyone in a shared workspace or project, your administrators, and whoever inherits the account. If the file would be awkward for any of those people to open, that is the finding.
How long is it kept, and what is it used for? Retention periods and whether inputs are used to improve models differ between consumer and organisational agreements.
Four questions, three outcomes: paste, redact then paste, or do not paste. The middle one carries most of the real work and gets skipped most often. Themes across forty exit interviews do not need a single name in them.
Two things sit on top of this. If you work in health, finance, law, insurance or the public sector, or you handle data about people in the EU, sector rules and the EU AI Act add duties that attach to how a system is used, not to which vendor you picked. And if nobody in your organisation can answer question two or four, that is an organisational gap rather than a personal one — the governance maturity model is the shape of the conversation to have. None of this is legal advice. When the answer is unclear, the correct move is to ask whoever owns the policy, in writing, once.
Worked example
Shown here in Claude.
Back to the transcripts. Class: personal, and sensitive — people describing managers by name. Account: the organisation's licensed workspace, not a personal login. Retrieval: three colleagues share the project. Retention: governed by the organisational agreement. Verdict: redact, then paste.
The redaction is mechanical:
Before: "[FULL NAME] ([EMPLOYEE ID], Line 3 supervisor, left 14 March)
said her manager, [MANAGER NAME], never ran the shift handover."
After: "A production supervisor who left in Q1 said handover was not
run by their manager."Nothing needed for theme analysis was lost. Then make the rule part of the workspace rather than part of your memory, as a standing instruction on the project:
Data rule for this project. Every input is de-identified before it is
pasted: no personal names, employee IDs, team names, job titles below
director, or dates more precise than the quarter.
If a document I paste still contains any of those, stop, name what you
found, and do not answer until I confirm.That last clause is what turns an intention into a check. You will forget once. The workspace should not.
In your tool
Which terms apply to you depends on the plan your account sits on, and that is the first thing to look up.
| Tool | Where the answer lives |
|---|---|
| Claude | Account settings show whether you are on a personal plan or an organisational one; organisational plans are governed by your employer's agreement and admins control project membership. |
| ChatGPT | Personal accounts and workspace accounts are separate, with separate data controls; the workspace one is governed by your organisation's agreement. |
| Gemini | A personal Google account and a workspace account carry different data handling; the workspace one follows your organisation's terms. |
| Microsoft 365 Copilot | It inherits your existing file permissions, so it can surface anything you already have access to — a different exposure, not a smaller one. |
Product surfaces checked 2026-08-04.
Try it
Take one of the inputs your Unit 0 task actually needs — the document you would have to paste to run it. Answer the four questions in writing, one line each, no hedging. Then write the verdict: paste, redact, or refuse, and the question that decided it.
You are done when the verdict fits on one line and names its deciding question. If you could not answer the account question or the retention question, stop there. That blank is your result, and the next step is an email to the person who owns the policy, not a paste.
Common failures
- Treating policy as a memory test. Reading a document once and trying to recall clause 4.2 at the moment of pasting. The four questions survive re-orgs and vendor changes; a half-remembered clause does not.
- Skipping the middle option. Framing the choice as paste or refuse throws away the case that covers most work — strip the identifiers and the task becomes ordinary. Refusal feels responsible and often just moves the work back to your evenings.
- The account you forgot you were in. A personal login open in the same browser as the work one. Same screen, same model, different contract, and nothing on the page tells you which one you are using.