# Keep AI on your terms

AI can work for you without owning your data. You decide what it can reach, see, and remember.

When you let AI help you, four questions matter: where it works, what it can reach, what you tell it, and what it remembers. Give each AI tool its own space with a clear job, away from your personal accounts and files. Then look past your own data: your chats, contacts, photos, and email hold other people too, so keep their details out of the AI you connect. Give it access on purpose, and remove that access when the task is done. Share sensitive details only with an AI that keeps them as private as the risk requires. Keep what it should remember in files you own, so you can take them to the next AI.

## Start here

### [Separate software contexts](https://live.freewithtech.com/practices/separate-software-contexts.md)

It's easier to switch into work, personal time, or reading on purpose when each has its own clearly separate space.

**Start small:** Create one separate browser profile or workspace for the context that most often leaks into another.

### [Keep AI agents away from your personal data](https://live.freewithtech.com/practices/keep-ai-agents-away-from-your-personal-data.md)

An AI that can click, run programs, or change things for you shouldn't have access to your personal apps and data by default.

**Start small:** Check what one AI agent can see or run, and take away one permission it doesn't need.

### [Keep other people's data out of your AI](https://live.freewithtech.com/practices/keep-other-peoples-data-out-of-your-ai.md)

Your messages, contacts, photos, and email are full of other people, and they never agreed to an AI reading them.

**Start small:** Check whether one AI app on your phone can read your contacts or messages, and turn that access off.

### [Review connected apps and permissions](https://live.freewithtech.com/practices/review-connected-apps-and-permissions.md)

Connected apps can retain access to sensitive accounts and data after their original purpose has ended.

**Start small:** Open the connected-apps page for one important account and remove one integration you no longer use.

### [Use private AI for sensitive topics](https://live.freewithtech.com/practices/use-private-ai-for-sensitive-topics.md)

Sensitive context belongs only in AI systems with privacy boundaries that match the risk.

**Start small:** For one sensitive task, use a privacy-first AI assistant or a model that runs on your own device.

### [Keep AI memory in portable Markdown](https://live.freewithtech.com/practices/keep-ai-memory-in-portable-markdown.md)

What AI should remember about you should stay readable, editable, and yours, not locked inside one AI company's app.

**Start small:** Save one AI prompt you use often in a Markdown file on your device.

## Concepts in this position

- [local-first](https://live.freewithtech.com/concepts/local-first.md): Your important data has its main home on a device you control. Online services come second.
- [digital hygiene](https://live.freewithtech.com/concepts/digital-hygiene.md): Regular check-ups keep your accounts, apps, and settings in view and up to date.
- [purpose-separated contexts](https://live.freewithtech.com/concepts/purpose-separated-contexts.md): Each device or software space has one clear job, so work, personal life, and other areas don't mix.
- [minimal retention](https://live.freewithtech.com/concepts/minimal-retention.md): Data, accounts, and old conversations stay only as long as they still have a use.
- [least access](https://live.freewithtech.com/concepts/least-access.md): Apps, websites, and services get only the access the task needs. Trackers get none.

## From the public trail

- [things I don’t tell AI](https://fwt.wtf/ai-is-not-a-friend?utm_source=live.freewithtech.com)

## Continue

- [Practice database](https://live.freewithtech.com/)
- [All positions](https://live.freewithtech.com/by.md)
- [Concepts](https://live.freewithtech.com/concepts.md)