Personal information
Japanese 個人情報
Personal information is anything that can identify a specific living person, such as a name, contact details or a face photo. Typing it into an AI tool sends it to an outside service, so remove it or check the settings first.
Privacy laws such as Korea's Personal Information Protection Act treat information about a living person as personal information when it can identify that person, for example a name, a resident registration number or video footage. Information that does not identify anyone on its own still counts if it can easily be combined with other information to do so. It is like a jigsaw puzzle: one piece shows nothing, but a few pieces together reveal a face. A customer's original email or a photo showing a staff member's face can count too.
Watch out Text and photos you put into an AI tool's input box are sent to the company running that service. Japan's Personal Information Protection Commission has asked businesses that enter prompts containing personal information to check carefully that the service will not use it for machine learning. Before pasting, delete names and contact details or replace them with something like "Customer A", and check the training settings.
Source: Personal Information Protection Act (Korea), Article 2 (Definitions) · Alert on the Use of Generative AI Services · Act on the Protection of Personal Information (checked 2026-10-26)
Pages that use this term
- One app was breached, and names, emails and phone numbers in 10,788,963 member records leaked together/en/blog/yakiniku-king-app-breach-en
- Three holes in one company, plus old data that was kept instead of deleted/en/blog/skyticket-breach-en
- One email vendor was breached, and member data from dozens of its clients went with it/en/blog/ymirlink-cuenote-breach-en