The National Information Technology Development Agency (NITDA) has warned organisations and their staff against entering personal, classified or confidential information into public artificial intelligence (AI) platforms.
The warning was contained in an advisory issued by NITDA’s Computer Emergency Readiness and Response Team (CERRT.NG), following the increasing use of public AI tools such as ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude and Copilot for drafting, research and other work-related activities.
NITDA said information entered into public AI platforms may potentially be retained, logged or handled by the service providers, creating data-protection and security risks for individuals and organisations.
The agency warned that employees using such platforms could inadvertently expose personally identifiable information, classified government information or confidential organisational data.
According to NITDA, the disclosure of personal information could constitute a data breach and potentially lead to legal consequences, while exposing classified or confidential information could compromise organisational security and public trust.
The agency advised organisations and their employees not to enter confidential, classified, official-use or personal information into public AI platforms.
NITDA also recommended that organisations use only approved AI tools for official work and remove, anonymise or pseudonymise sensitive personal information before using AI platforms.
It further advised users to review the privacy and data-handling policies of AI platforms before using them and avoid uploading internal documents unless they have specific authorisation to do so.
NITDA urged organisations and their staff to comply with existing data-protection, information-security and AI-use policies when using artificial intelligence tools.
