Keep your financial data safe

This is the most important lesson in the course. Read it before you paste anything financial into any AI tool.

Never paste these

No exceptions, no matter how convenient it seems.

Passwords, PINs, one-time codes. Nothing that grants access to an account.
Full account numbers. Bank accounts, card numbers, brokerage account identifiers.
National identity numbers. Tax IDs, social security numbers, passport or national ID numbers.
API keys with trading or withdrawal permission. If you connect an exchange anywhere, the key should be read-only.
Recovery phrases or private keys. Anyone holding a crypto seed phrase owns the wallet. There is no situation in which an AI assistant needs it.
Other people’s details. Your spouse’s salary, a relative’s account information. It is not yours to share.
Scans of documents containing all of the above. Uploading a statement image uploads every number printed on it, including the ones you did not think about.

Why, specifically

Chat history is stored. Depending on the service and your settings, conversations may be retained, reviewed by staff for quality, or used to improve models. Assume anything you type could be read by someone else.

Prompts travel to servers you do not control. Unless you are running a model locally, your text leaves your device.

Accounts get compromised. If someone gains access to your AI account, they gain access to its history. A chat log containing your account numbers is a serious problem in a way that a chat log about pension rules is not.

You cannot unsend it. Deleting a conversation may not remove it from every backup.

You can have a genuinely useful financial conversation without exposing anything.

Safe by nature:

Amounts without identifiers — “I have around 40,000 in savings”
Percentages and ratios — “roughly 60% shares, 30% bonds, 10% cash”
Asset types and tickers — “I hold an S&P 500 index fund and some government bonds”
Goals and timelines — “I want to retire in about 18 years”
General questions about products, rules and concepts

Notice that this is enough for almost every question worth asking. “Is 60/30/10 sensible for someone 18 years from retirement?” is a good question and gives away nothing.

The redaction habit

When you want to discuss a real document, strip it first.

Take a statement and remove the account number, your address, and your customer reference. Keep the dates, descriptions and amounts. What remains is enough for the AI to categorise spending or spot a pattern, and it identifies nobody.

The same applies to screenshots. Crop before you upload, every time.

Connected tools are a different case

There is an important distinction between pasting data into a chat and connecting a tool to your account.

When you paste, the data becomes conversation text — stored in chat history, outside your control.

When you connect a proper integration, the AI requests specific information through a permissioned channel, you approve what it can see, and you can revoke that access later. The good ones are read-only by default, ask for confirmation before changing anything, and keep a log of every request.

Connecting well-built tools is generally the safer path, and it is what Module 5 covers. The questions to ask of any such integration:

Is access read-only unless I explicitly grant more?
Can I revoke it, and how quickly?
Is there a log of what was accessed?
Who is the company, and where is my data held?

If a service cannot answer those clearly, do not connect it.

A working rule

Before you send anything financial, ask yourself:

If this exact message appeared publicly with my name on it, what would the damage be?

Embarrassment is survivable. Someone being able to access your money is not.

Practice step

Check the data settings of the AI assistant you use most. Find out whether chat history is retained and whether conversations are used for training. Most services let you turn training off, and many offer a temporary chat mode that does not save.

Take the two minutes to set it the way you want it now, rather than after you have pasted something you regret.

Next: How to ask good money questions — getting genuinely useful answers.