A story broke this week that caught my eye.
Hundreds of private conversations with Claude, one of the most popular AI tools out there, were found publicly available online. Not because of a hack. Not a data breach. Because users clicked a share button without fully understanding what it did.
The shared links were indexed by Google. CVs with names and phone numbers. Corporate project notes. Healthcare research. Transcripts of conversations people thought were private.
Nobody clicked share intending for strangers to find their stuff. The button said “anyone with the link can view this.” It did not mention Google.
The same thing happened with ChatGPT last year. And Grok before that. At some point it stops being a coincidence and starts being a pattern worth paying attention to.
But here is what gets missed in these stories. The share button is not the real issue. The real issue is what people are putting into these tools in the first place.
I talk to a lot of business owners who use AI every day and most are doing sensible things with it. Drafting emails. Summarising documents. Writing up meeting notes. All fine.
But some of the things I hear people typing in are not fine at all.
Client information. Full names, contact details, account histories. Pasted straight in because it was quicker than summarising. Staff performance notes. Financial forecasts. And yes, passwords. Actual passwords.
That data goes somewhere. It might be stored. It might feed future model training. It might end up accessible because of a settings choice you did not know you made. You handed over control of it the moment you pressed send.
The practical version of this is simple. If you would not write it on a postcard and leave it in a coffee shop, it should not go into an AI chat window. No client data, no login credentials, nothing commercially sensitive, nothing you would struggle to explain to your clients or your insurers.
If your team is using AI tools and nobody has had a conversation about what should and should not go into them, that conversation is probably overdue.
I am happy to have it with you. No sales pitch, no agenda.
James
