TALAMANA · THE AI LITERACY MAP FOR ARCHITECTURE AND DESIGN · Studio Practice · AGE 16—22 · POSITIONAL · HELD
Client confidentiality is not privacy
Removing names answers the privacy question and leaves the confidentiality question untouched.
The dilemma
Tuesday, eleven at night. The client's total-station survey and the structural consultant's forty-page report are open on your screen. A model could turn the report into a one-page summary by midnight. You have already removed the client's name and the plot number from the file. Nothing left in it is about a person. Is it now safe to upload?
The choices
Upload it: no personal data, no privacy problem, and the deadline is real. Or ask a different question first — not "is anyone's privacy in this?" but "whose file is this, and what did they agree to?" — and read the contract or the NDA before deciding. Or do the summary yourself tonight, and raise the question of an approved tool with the office tomorrow, so the next report has a route.
The consequence
Removing names answers the privacy question and leaves the confidentiality question untouched. A survey with its coordinates still identifies the site. A structural report still belongs to the consultant who wrote it and the client who paid for it. If the agreement says drawings and reports stay with the studio, the upload is a breach whether or not anyone ever finds out, and the breach is the studio's, not only yours. The second route costs ten minutes of reading. The third costs an evening and gives the office a rule it did not have.
The case
A small practice in Pune has a hospital client. The agreement says no project document goes to a third party without written consent. An intern anonymises the ward plans — no hospital name, no address — and uploads them to a free tool to get a room schedule. The plans still show the pharmacy store, the server room and the oxygen manifold. The hospital's security consultant finds out when the tool's output is pasted into a shared document with the tool's name in the header. Nothing personal was exposed. Something confidential was.
Try it
Take one live file from your own work: a survey, a plan, a client email. Write three lines. Does it hold anyone's personal data? Is it confidential by contract or by the plain duty of the job? Who would have to agree before it went into any outside service? If you cannot name that person, it stays in the office.
Take it to crit
Ask the student to name who owns each document in their project folder, and under what agreement. Then ask which of those documents they have already put into an outside tool. Watch whether they answer the privacy question when you asked the confidentiality one.
How it works
The two duties come from two places. Privacy comes from data-protection law: India's Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023 covers digital personal data — information about an identifiable person — and says nothing about a survey or a budget. Confidentiality comes from the agreement (a contract clause, an NDA) and from professional duty: the Council of Architecture's regulations, made under the Architects Act, 1972, bind a registered architect to the conditions of engagement and to integrity, and a breach of those conditions is a matter between the architect, the client and the Council, not the Data Protection Board. A practical test: anonymise the document, then ask whether you would still need permission to hand it to a stranger. If yes, the file is confidential, and removing names did nothing for it. THREE PILES on this map sorts what may go; this card explains why a clean-looking file can still belong in the "never" pile.
What this idea builds on
What this idea opens up
Sources
Open this idea on the map · The complete map · Logika · RBDS AI Lab, India · revised every edition.