TALAMANA · THE AI LITERACY MAP FOR ARCHITECTURE AND DESIGN · Ethics & Provenance · AGE 16—19 · FACTUAL · EVOLVING
Your data may be the price
The price tag tells you nothing about the data policy.
The idea
A free AI tool is paid for somehow: by paying users, investors, advertising, and sometimes by data — what you type, upload and correct. Three questions are separate. What does the service collect? How long does it keep it? May it train on it? Many services answer the third differently for free and business accounts, and many let you switch training off: a setting you can check, not a sentence you can hope for. Your own sketch is your decision. A client's plan is not only yours. Know what you are handing over, and agree on purpose.
Why it matters
A project file uploaded to a free tool can leave your control for good. The client trusted you with it. Every careless upload spends some of that trust.
See it in the studio
An intern drops a residential plan, with the client's name on the title block, into a free chatbot to "get a quick area statement." The plan is now on a company server, under terms nobody in the office has read. The area statement took thirty seconds. The exposure may last years.
Watch for this
Assuming paid means private and free means public. Read the actual terms. Some paid services train on your data; some free ones do not. The price tag tells you nothing about the data policy.
Try it
Take one AI tool you use. Find the three sentences in its terms that say what it collects, how long it keeps it, and whether it may train on it. Time how long they take to find. Then find the setting that turns training off, if there is one. Decide: one thing you would upload freely, and one thing you would never upload without the client's say-so.
Prove it
For one free tool, state what it collects, what it retains and what it may train on — three separate answers, each pointed at the sentence in the terms — and name the one category of file you will not upload without explicit permission.
How it works
Two kinds of law touch this. Data-protection law governs personal data — names, addresses, faces. In the EU the GDPR has applied since 2018; India's Digital Personal Data Protection Act was passed in 2023, the DPDP Rules were notified in November 2025, and the provisions are being commenced in phases — the children's-data provisions are scheduled for May 2027. Contract law governs the rest: the terms you clicked through, and the agreement you have with your client about confidentiality. This card is marked EVOLVING because the tools' terms change without notice and India's law is still being switched on section by section. Read the terms as they stand today, not someone's note about them.
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.