Zansa › Answers › Forecasting and data science
Is it safe to upload sales spreadsheets with customer names to an AI chatbot?
Generally no. Customer names and contact details are personal data, and uploading them to a public AI chatbot may breach privacy law, your contracts or customer expectations. Remove or replace identifiers first, share only the aggregates the task needs, or use an approved business tool with proper data agreements.
Before uploading anything, ask:
- Does the file contain names, emails, phone numbers, addresses or ID numbers?
- Is the tool's retention and training policy acceptable?
- Does a data processing agreement exist?
- Could aggregated or pseudonymised data do the job?
For many analyses, customer IDs replaced by random codes and totals by product and month are enough. Note that pseudonymised data can still count as personal data if people could be re-identified, so remove unnecessary columns too.
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