How to use ChatGPT without sharing names
Your question about a difficult colleague, a worried friend or a client’s contract is full of other people. They never chose to be in your chat. Here’s how to keep them out, and still get a good answer.
Short answer
Replace each person with a fixed label, like Person A and Person B, and take out what the AI doesn’t need: full names, addresses, phone numbers, email addresses and ID numbers. Keep what happened and what you want, and check the top and bottom of anything you paste.
You want advice on a message to your landlord. Or help with a reference letter for a colleague. To get a useful answer, you paste in the whole thing: names, addresses, the lot. That’s exactly what makes the answer good, and exactly what you’d rather not give away.
Why it matters
Most of what people share with AI isn’t about themselves. It’s about the people around them. Those people didn’t agree to it, and they can’t delete it. Chats can be kept, reviewed by people, used for training or, as in 2025, preserved by court order. More on how long chats are kept.
Doing it by hand
Researchers who watched people use ChatGPT found that most of them already clean up their text by hand: they leave out names, use made-up ones, or skip some tasks completely (CHI 2024). It works, but it has problems:
- It’s easy to miss one. A name in a signature, an address in the header, a phone number at the bottom.
- Made-up names get confusing. If you rename everyone, the answer comes back with the fake names, and you have to translate it back.
- Vague questions get vague answers. “Someone at work” gives the AI less to go on than the real story.
Asking something personal? Melo, Kamelo’s free private chat, answers on your own computer, so your question isn’t sent anywhere. How it works
Tips that work
- Replace each person with a label, and keep it the same: Person A, Person B. Don’t reuse a label for two people.
- Take out what the AI doesn’t need: full names, addresses, phone numbers, email addresses, account and ID numbers.
- Keep what it does need: what happened, in what order, and what you want.
- Check the top and bottom of anything you paste. That’s where the details hide.
A label can still give someone away
Your AI account knows who you are. So “my sister” or “my manager” can still point to one person, even without a name. Write “a family member” or “someone I work with” when the exact relationship doesn’t matter for the answer.
Where Kamelo helps
The free Kamelo extension doesn’t remove names, so the tips above still matter. When a question is personal, like your health or money worries, it suggests a temporary chat or Melo, which answers on your own computer in Chrome. For work with client data, Kamelo Business does it automatically: it swaps names, addresses, email addresses, bank and ID numbers for placeholders like [PERSON_1] before you send, and puts them back in the answer.