Let's be honest: you've pasted a .env file into ChatGPT before.
Maybe it was just to debug a connection issue. Maybe you needed help formatting a tricky config block. It felt harmless — a quick copy-paste, then delete the conversation. No harm done, right?
Wrong.
Every time you paste code, configuration, or customer data into a public AI chat, you're sending that data to servers you don't control, through a network path you can't audit, into training pipelines with opaque retention policies.
Here's what actually happens to that data — and what you can do about it today.
