1. All Personally Identifiable Information (PII)
This is the most critical category to remove. Think of it as anything that directly points to you or someone else. This includes your full name, student ID number, date of birth, and home address. Most public AI tools are not designed with the same privacy
standards as your university's internal systems. When you upload data to a free or consumer-grade AI service, you are sending it to third-party servers where it can be stored, processed, and sometimes used to train future AI models. Removing these identifiers is the first and most important step in protecting your privacy.
2. Contact and Account Details
Your phone number, personal email address, and login credentials for any system should never be in a document you upload. This also extends to bank account details or any financial information that might be embedded in your notes. While it seems unlikely for these to be in lecture notes, sometimes students jot down personal reminders in the margins. It’s vital to double-check. Once this information enters a third-party AI platform, you lose control over it, creating a significant security risk. A good rule of thumb is to never put anything into a public AI tool that you wouldn't feel comfortable posting on a public website.
3. Sensitive or Private Opinions
Your notes might contain more than just facts and figures. You might have written down a critical thought about a topic, a personal feeling about a class, or a private comment about a classmate or professor. While these seem harmless, AI models can process and store this information. If that data were ever to be exposed, these out-of-context opinions could cause personal or professional embarrassment. Your study notes should be a safe space for your thoughts, but once they are uploaded, that safety is no longer guaranteed. It's best to keep your personal reflections and candid opinions separate from the material you feed into an AI.
4. Information About Other People
Your duty to protect personal data extends beyond just your own. Your notes might mention classmates from a group project, a professor’s personal anecdote, or details about a research participant. Uploading this information without their consent is a major privacy violation. In academic and research settings, this can have serious consequences, potentially breaching university policies and data protection regulations like FERPA, which protects student educational records. Always anonymise data, removing any details that could identify another person before you consider uploading it.
5. Professor's Intellectual Property
Many students don't realise that the materials a professor creates for a course—including lecture slides, handouts, and even the spoken lecture itself—are often their copyrighted intellectual property. Uploading these materials to an external platform without permission can constitute copyright infringement. Some universities explicitly state that faculty own the copyrights to the course materials they create. To stay on the right side of academic rules, avoid uploading verbatim transcripts of lectures or scanned copies of your professor's unique handouts and slides. Summarise their ideas in your own words first.
6. Content That Could Lead to Academic Dishonesty
AI tools can be fantastic for summarising content you've already learned, but they can also lead you into a grey area of academic integrity. For instance, if your notes contain specific answers to an upcoming test or assignment, uploading them could be seen as an attempt to get an unfair advantage. Most university honour codes are still catching up to AI, but a general rule is that using AI to summarise your own notes is usually fine, while using it to generate answers or complete assignments is not. Scrub any material that looks less like study notes and more like a cheat sheet to avoid any perception of academic misconduct.
