Avoiding Scams and Fake AI Tools

Different contexts, different rules.

What you'll leave with

By the end of this lesson, you'll understand how privacy considerations differ between personal and professional AI use — and you'll have a simple habit for protecting both.

Why this matters

Using AI for your own personal tasks — planning meals, drafting personal messages, thinking through decisions — carries a certain level of privacy consideration. Using AI for work tasks carries a different, often higher, level.

This lesson helps you navigate both contexts with confidence.

The idea

A practical approach for work tasks: describe the situation in general terms without including specific names, numbers, or identifying information. AI can help with structure, language, and thinking even without the sensitive specifics.

The teaching block

Personal privacy:

For personal use, the main considerations are your own sensitive information (covered in Lesson 6.1) and the private information of people in your life.

You can describe situations involving other people without including identifying details. "A close friend going through a difficult situation" does not require their name, their details, or identifying information about their circumstances. AI can help you with the interpersonal situation without those details.

Professional considerations:

• Company policy: many organisations have explicit policies about what can be processed through external AI tools. Know yours.
• Client confidentiality: information about clients, customers, or business partners is often subject to legal confidentiality obligations.
• NDAs: non-disclosure agreements may restrict what you can share outside company systems.
• Proprietary information: business strategies, product plans, financial projections, personnel decisions.

Example

Show how to get AI help with a work document without sharing the sensitive content it contains.

Instead of:

Try:

Show the generalised prompt, the output, and how you would fill in the specific details afterward. The result is the same useful draft with significantly less exposure.

Try this now

Think of a recent work task where you used or considered using AI. Would the approach above — describing the situation without sharing sensitive specifics — have worked for that task?

If yes: practise rewriting that prompt to remove any confidential details. If no: note this as a case where AI is not the right tool.

Save this

Quiet takeaway

Privacy at work is not just about protecting the company — it is about protecting yourself. Knowing where the lines are before you cross them is the simplest possible form of professional care.

Next

Privacy handled. The next lesson covers a different category of risk: the ways AI-generated content is being used to deceive people, and how to stay alert without becoming paranoid.