What Happens to Your Data When You Use ChatGPT — And How to Protect It (opens in new tab)

Let's be honest: you've pasted a .env file into ChatGPT before. Maybe it was just to debug a connection issue. Maybe you needed help formatting a tricky config block. It felt harmless — a quick copy-paste, then delete the conversation. No harm done, right? Wrong. Every time you paste code, configuration, or customer data into a public AI chat, you're sending that data to servers you don't control, through a network path you can't audit, into training pipelines with opaque retention policies. ...