What Member Details to Keep Out of an AI Tool

Keep anything that identifies a member out of a public chatbot. If you can swap it for a placeholder like "the member", do that. Most drafts don't need the real details.

Your gym holds more personal information than it feels like. A simple booking system has names, phone numbers and emails. A billing system adds payment details.

What to leave out

Treat all of this as off limits for a public tool:

• Full names, together with anything else about them
• Phone numbers, email and home addresses
• Payment details, card numbers and bank information
• Date of birth and ID
• Photos or video of members
• Anything about health, injury, pregnancy or medical conditions, including notes from the front desk
• Reasons given for a freeze or cancellation
• Access codes, passwords and the doors that open with them

Health details need the most care. Some members tell staff about an injury so the instructor knows. That belongs in your own records, not in a chatbot.

What the regulators say

Australia's privacy regulator is the OAIC. As a best-practice step, it tells organisations not to put personal details, least of all sensitive ones, into public AI chatbots.¹ It describes sensitive information as a part of personal information that usually gets stronger protection.¹

That is Australian guidance. It's a good reading list for any country, but it isn't the law where you live.

Where to look for your own rules:

• Australia: the OAIC
• United Kingdom: the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO)
• United States: the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and your state's attorney general
• Elsewhere: your national or regional privacy regulator

Read what they publish. If you're unsure, ask a qualified adviser. This page can't say whether a particular use is allowed, and no tool can either.

What the tool's settings do

OpenAI's help page for ChatGPT says the controls you get depend on your sign-in, your plan and your workspace.² On personal accounts with the Free, Plus or Pro plans, sharing data to improve the model is switched on by default.² You can switch it off. But doing so leaves your saved chats in place.²

That was checked on the date shown at the top of this page, and settings change. Open the maker's page again before you rely on it. Other tools have their own settings, so read theirs.

The point: a setting may change who can learn from your text. It does not make member details fine to paste. If the detail isn't needed, leave it out.

Placeholders in practice

Instead of pasting this:

"Sam Citizen, phone [real number], wants to freeze because of a knee operation."

Paste this:

"A member wants to freeze their membership. Write a short reply explaining how freezes work. Facts: [your freeze rules]."

The reply is just as useful. You add the name when you send it. And the knee never leaves your records.

Habits that help

• Write a short staff rule: "No member names, contact details, payment or health information in public AI tools."
• Keep a template folder with blanks so staff don't need to paste real examples.
• Use work accounts, not personal ones, so someone is responsible for the settings.
• Never paste a spreadsheet, a waitlist or a full email thread.
• If a member's message includes private details, quote only the question.

If you already pasted something you shouldn't have, check the tool's own settings and help pages, and look at your regulator's guidance on what to do next. Tell whoever looks after privacy in your business.

For drafting help that stays clean, go back to where AI helps with gym admin.