The Data You Keep Out
10 min read
Everything so far has been about what goes into the assistant: the Brain, the notes, the numbers. This lesson is the other gate, what does not go in, and it needs deciding now, before Chapter 6 multiplies the number of hands on the system. An owner with good instincts pastes carefully; a system is only as careful as its least careful operator on their busiest day. So the rules get written down, like everything else here.
The never-paste list
Some data does not enter an AI conversation, in any form, for any workflow:
- Payment credentials. Card numbers, banking logins, e-transfer passwords. No workflow needs them; the Friday session's "analyze, never transact" rule already keeps money movement outside the assistant.
- Government identifiers. SINs, SSNs, passport numbers, yours, your employees', your customers'.
- Passwords and keys. To anything.
- Health information. A customer's, an employee's. "Reschedule, medical reasons" is all any draft needs.
- Active disputes. Personnel matters and legal conflicts are red-lane for authorship (Chapter 5's lanes) and never-paste for documents. The file about the dispute stays in the file.
The test behind the list: paste nothing you would not put on a postcard to a stranger who keeps excellent records. Reputable assistants have real privacy protections, and your subscription's settings deserve five minutes, most paid tiers let you opt out of your conversations being used for model training, and you should. But the postcard rule does not lean on any vendor's promise. Data that never enters cannot leak, whatever happens to the vendor, the settings, or the law.
The anonymize-by-default habit
Most workflows lose nothing when the identifying details stay behind. The invoice chaser needs "landlord, 4 units, $2,340, 32 days overdue." It does not need the landlord's name to draft the reminder; the name gets added at send time, by the human at the checkpoint, in the email client.
Three substitutions cover nearly everything:
Instead of Paste
Full name Role or initials: "the landlord",
"J.M."
Exact address Area: "east-end duplex"
Account/invoice number Round reference: "the March install
invoice"This habit costs seconds and buys two things: pasted conversations stop being a directory of your customers, and drafts come back with placeholder slots that force the checkpoint human to engage with who this is actually going to, which quietly improves tone too.
The Brain is public-by-design
Recall Chapter 2's rule: the Brain should be showable to a new hire on day one without checking with anyone. That was this lesson wearing a disguise. Prices, policies, voice, promos: all things a customer could learn by asking. Keep the Brain that way as it grows. The moment someone proposes adding "notes on difficult customers" to the Customers section, the answer is no; the Brain is business facts, and gets pasted into conversations daily, which makes it the worst possible home for anything sensitive.
Write the gate into the system
Like the lanes, the never-paste list lives as a half page in the system folder, `/ai-system/data-rules.md`, and every runbook's step 1 points to it. Every skill also gets one standing rule:
## Rules
- If pasted input contains a card number, government ID,
password, or health detail, stop and say so before doing
anything else. Do not repeat the value back.A skill cannot enforce your data policy, but it can be one more tripwire, and tripwires are cheap.
Try it now
Write your `data-rules.md` now: the never-paste list as given, plus anything your industry adds (a clinic, a law office, and a bookkeeping practice each extend it differently). Then audit this week's real usage: skim your recent assistant conversations and check what actually got pasted. Finding a full name and address in an old quote thread is common and not a crisis; it is the reason the habit becomes a written rule before your team inherits your pasting habits along with your runbooks.