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The waiting-room test, the ten things that never go into a chat, the swap for each one written out so the prompt still works, the two rules that make swapping hold up over a long conversation, the surprisingly long list of what is actually fine, the photo check that catches the leak most people miss, and the settings to find once in whichever tool you use.
Download the PDFTwo pages. Print it, or keep it on your phone for the swaps.
The test
If you would not read it out loud in a waiting room, it does not go in the chat.
Everything below is that rule applied to the things that actually come up in a house, plus the substitution that keeps the answer as good as it would have been.
What never goes in
Ten things. Read them once and you will recognize them for the rest of your life.
- 1. Full names of your kids. First name is usually fine. First plus last is a search result.
- 2. The school. Name, district, teacher’s name, the classroom number on the form.
- 3. Your address, and anything that reconstructs it. The bus stop. The cross street. The photo of the mail.
- 4. Your employer, your manager’s name, and anything from a work system.
- 5. Dates of birth. Especially with a name attached. That pair opens accounts.
- 6. Medical detail tied to a person. Diagnoses, medications, therapist names, the portal message.
- 7. Money identifiers. Account numbers, the last four, insurance IDs, policy numbers.
- 8. Login information. Passwords, security answers, the code that just arrived by text.
- 9. Other people’s private business. Your sister’s divorce. The neighbor’s diagnosis. It is not yours to paste.
- 10. Photos with any of the above visible in them. The form with the letterhead. The screen with the tab open.
The swaps
Every one keeps the answer exactly as useful. The model does not need the real noun. It needs the shape.
| Instead of | Write |
|---|---|
| the kid’s full name | my nine year old |
| the school name | her school |
| the teacher’s name | her teacher |
| your street | our street, about fifteen minutes from her school |
| your employer | my job |
| a date of birth | she turns ten in March |
| a diagnosis | a standing medical thing we manage daily |
| a medication name | her morning medication |
| the doctor’s practice | the pediatrician |
| an account number | the account |
Two rules make the swaps work
Keep the shape, drop the identity. “My nine year old, who reads well and melts down when she is hungry” is a better input than a full name and nothing else. Specificity about behavior costs you nothing. Specificity about identity is the only thing that does.
Be consistent inside one chat. Call her “my nine year old” in message one and message forty. The moment you switch to a real name to clarify something, the whole conversation carries it.
What is actually fine
Most of what people worry about is fine, and worrying about the wrong half is how the tool stops getting used.
Your schedule, your routines, your meal rotation, the supply list with the school header cropped off, first names, ages, what your kids will and will not eat, your own opinions, the argument you had about the dishwasher, the shape of your week, your budget in round numbers, your grocery list, the text you are trying to write, how you actually feel about all of it.
That list is nearly everything a household prompt needs. The privacy rules cost you almost nothing in practice, which is the point of writing them down once.
Photos, which are the real leak
The camera is the fastest way into these tools and the easiest place to get careless, because a photo carries things you did not type.
Before you send a picture, look at the edges. School letterhead. A name in the corner. The address block on a form. A visible screen behind it. A prescription label. A calendar with a full name on the appointment.
Crop first. Cropping in your photos app is faster than re-thinking it after, and a cropped form answers the question exactly as well as the whole one.
The settings to go find
Do this once, today, in whichever tool you use.
Open the settings and look for the section about data, privacy, or training. There is a control over whether your conversations can be used to improve the model. Decide once and set it. There is usually a separate control for how long chat history is kept, and a way to delete conversations. Know where both are.
Menus move and the wording changes between tools and versions, so go look rather than trusting a screenshot from six months ago. Five minutes now, and you never think about it again.
A quiet extra: for a genuinely sensitive one-off, use a temporary or incognito chat if your tool offers one, and close it when you are done.
The one thing to remember
You are allowed to use the tool. That is the actual message here.
The rule is small, the swaps are mechanical, and the fine list is nearly everything.
Print it. Run the swaps for one week and it stops being a decision you make at eleven at night.