Privacy label
- Industry term
A privacy label is a tag on a record, file, or message that says how sensitive it is and how it may be used or shared, such as "family only" or "confidential".
A label does nothing by itself. Other parts of a system act on it, such as a search filter that skips private records or a check that blocks them from outgoing mail. Telling an assistant to obey labels helps, though it can still slip or be tricked, so the protection that holds sits outside it.
Where you’ll meet it
At work, one client's contract sits in the shared drive with the label "Confidential". You ask the AI assistant in your email to draft a proposal for a different client, and the draft offers the first client's discounted price, word for word.
What to do
Delete the price before sending. Then ask whoever manages your company's AI tools to keep Confidential files out of what the assistant reads when writing outside the company. If no such setting exists, keep those files in a folder the assistant can't open, so no draft can quote them.
Easy to mix up
| Privacy label | Permission scope |
|---|---|
| Yes, each file can carry its own label | Usually not, since an app's access covers whole folders or accounts |
Check yourself
Your assistant writes a monthly summary from your team's notes. One note it drew on is labeled private. What label should the summary carry?
Go deeperLabels can fall off copies, and one tag can't carry every rule
Organizations usually define a handful of levels, such as public, internal, confidential, and restricted, and some document tools apply them automatically when they find content like account numbers. Labels also get lost in copies. Text pasted into a new document, or quoted in an AI's answer, arrives without its tag unless the tool carries the label over.
One tag is coarse. It may not say how long a record may be kept, where it may be stored, or which fields inside it are sensitive, so some systems label individual fields or attach retention rules. Untagged records need a default set by the data's risk; when the risk is unknown, private until someone decides is the safer choice.