Summary: Your starting point: write down what you're protecting and from whom

The previous lesson turned a cloud into a list: three nameable privacy worries (surveillance, storage and leak risk, vendor lock-in) where there had been an undirected feeling. Aisha left that lesson with a list. This lesson gave the list an address. Generic worries apply to everyone. A seed paragraph applies to you, in your job, with your situation, in your own words.

The two questions

The Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Surveillance Self-Defense team open their personal security guide with six questions. The lesson uses just the first two.

What do I want to protect? EFF calls these your assets. For most readers of this track, assets fall into a small number of buckets: information about other people who trust you (students, clients, patients, family members), information about yourself you have reason to keep close (health, legal exposure, professional drafts in progress), credentials and account access, and original work not yet finished or published. You will not have something in every bucket. The buckets exist to make sure you do not miss a category.

Who do I want to protect it from? EFF calls the party on the other side your adversary. The word sounds personal; the definition is broader and more useful. An adversary is any party that could come into possession of your assets in a way that costs you something, regardless of intent. For an AI-tool seed paragraph, the relevant list usually includes some combination of the vendor itself, whoever the vendor shares your data with, whoever might breach the vendor, people with shared account access, and your own moment of inattention. Not enemies by design; adversaries by circumstance.

The paragraph

Two questions, one paragraph, five sentences or fewer. Aisha’s version named three specific assets (student names and report-card comments, her district login, draft progress reports containing parent contact information), three specific adversaries (the vendor’s training pipeline, a breach of the vendor’s systems, anyone with shared district access who is not the teacher of record, and her own tab-leaving habit), and a third sentence naming the worry behind the worry: not that the district is adversarial, but that the data trail outlives her control.

The third sentence is a bonus, not the assignment. Two true sentences always outweigh three sentences that sound complete. If the third sentence comes naturally, keep it; the part you will look back on in Phase 6 and recognize as your real motivation often lives there.

The paragraph is private. It is a planning artifact for you, not for sharing.

Three pitfalls the lesson named

Three patterns most readers fall into on the first pass.

The first is writing the paragraph as someone else’s threat model. Privacy literature is full of journalist-shaped and lawyer-shaped threat models because those are the high-stakes cases writers reach for. Yours probably looks different. Borrowing gravity from a situation that is not yours produces a paragraph that is accurate but not actionable; the right input is your real situation, not an aspirational one.

The second is listing assets you do not actually have. A short paragraph that is accurate beats a long paragraph that is aspirational. If you do not handle client data, client data does not go on the asset list.

The third is treating the paragraph as final. It is not. Phase 2 shows you what an AI tool actually does with your assets along the way. Phase 3 gives you a four-category vocabulary for the threats. Phase 4 teaches a five-question rubric for reading a vendor’s actual posture. Phase 5 introduces architectural alternatives. By the time you reach lesson 6.6, you will revise the paragraph with everything you have learned and grow it into a full personal privacy plan.

What the paragraph does

The paragraph is small. It is also where everything else in this track gets its grip.

A seed paragraph is not a security policy. Aisha’s response after writing hers was a sticky note on her laptop: “check what’s in the tab before you paste.” One small adjustment, made by a person who had just decided what she was protecting and from whom. That is the level of action Phase 1 calls for.

Phase 2 opens with the next question: what actually happens, mechanically, when you press Enter in an AI tool? The seed paragraph tells you what is at stake. Phase 2 starts showing you the path that stake travels.

The first paragraph is the seed. Lesson 6.6 is the harvest. Both are yours.