What actually leaves when you paste

The mental model most people carry is of a search box. You type, something comes back, nothing has changed. That model is wrong in a way that matters, and correcting it is most of this module.

The transfer

When you paste text into a hosted assistant, that text is transmitted to a third party's infrastructure, processed there, and retained there for some period under terms you did not read. If that text contains personal data, and most work text does, you have disclosed personal data to a recipient, usually in another country.

Under the revised Swiss Federal Act on Data Protection, disclosure is processing. Article 6 sets the principles every processing operation must satisfy: lawfulness, good faith, proportionality, purpose limitation and accuracy. Purpose limitation is the one that bites hardest here. Data collected to administer a policy was not collected so that a drafting tool could be trained or operated on it, and the fact that the new use is convenient does not make it compatible.

Swiss law does not use the GDPR's model of a named legal basis for private controllers. Instead, Article 30 treats processing that breaches the personality of the data subject as unlawful unless justified, and Article 31 sets out the justifications: consent, an overriding private or public interest, or a legal provision. Federal bodies work differently again; under Article 34(2) they need a statutory basis.

The practical effect is similar to the GDPR's in one respect. Someone has to be able to say why this particular disclosure was permissible. "The tool was available" is not an answer in either system.

The duty to have said so beforehand

Article 19 requires the controller to inform the data subject, on collection, of the controller's identity and contact details, the purpose of the processing, and the recipients or categories of recipients. Where data is transferred abroad, it also requires the state concerned and the safeguard relied on. Article 20 provides exceptions, and they are exceptions rather than a general escape.

Read that list against what happens when a colleague pastes a customer's complaint into a chatbot. The recipient is a company the customer has never heard of. The state is one nobody identified. The safeguard is whatever the vendor's terms happen to say. None of it was in the privacy notice, because nobody knew this would happen.

This is the heart of the shadow AI problem. It is not primarily a security incident. It is a transparency failure that has already occurred, invisibly, many times, and it cannot be fixed retrospectively because the duty attached at collection.

The categories that raise the stakes

Three kinds of content change the analysis when they leave.

Special category data. Health information, biometric data, data on religious or political views, data on trade union membership, data on criminal proceedings. An insurance claim narrative is frequently health data without anybody labelling it as such.

Third-party confidential information. Material you hold under contract from a client, a partner or a supplier. Your data protection analysis may be sound and you may still be in breach of a confidentiality clause, which is a separate obligation with separate consequences.

Data about people who are not your customers. A complaint naming a member of staff, a witness, or a third party involved in an incident. Those people have the same rights and your notice almost certainly never reached them.

When it is a breach, and what then

Article 24 requires notification to the Federal Data Protection and Information Commissioner as soon as possible where a breach of data security is likely to lead to a high risk to the personality or fundamental rights of the data subject.

Note the standard: as soon as possible. There is no 72-hour deadline in Swiss law. This is worth stating flatly because the 72-hour figure is so widely repeated that people assume it applies everywhere, and some incident playbooks written for Swiss organisations contain it. It comes from the GDPR. If your organisation operates under both, you have two different standards to meet, and the Swiss one is a judgement about speed rather than a clock you can run down.

Penalties under Swiss law also work differently from what people expect. They fall on responsible natural persons rather than on the company, with fines up to CHF 250,000 for wilful breaches, including breach of the Article 21 information duty. That changes who in the room should be paying attention.

As of 24 September 2026.