DB Labs — The Redaction Briefing
Before you submit anything to the Lab — read this. The single most important skill in DB Labs, and it works on any Ai, anywhere, for the rest of your life.
⚠ Read This First ⚠
The Redaction BriefingThe single most important five minutes in the Lab. The skill is yours forever after.
Reading time: ~5 minutes. Then you are ready.
The Core Rule
Nothing identifying ever leaves your hands. Not your name. Not your address. Not your account numbers. Not your Social Security number. Not your medical record number. Not your employer. Not your specific dates of birth. Not your specific dollar amounts that could be cross-referenced. Not the names of your children, your spouse, your doctors, your lawyers, your accountants. Nothing.
The Lab is a research environment, not an intake desk. You are teaching yourself the muscle. We are the gym. The strength is yours to keep.
Why This Matters
Every Ai you will ever use — ours, theirs, the next one, the one after that — is more useful and more honest when you give it your real situation. But "your real situation" does not require your real identity. The pattern is what matters. The person is yours to protect.
A skilled user of Ai learns to translate their actual life into anonymized facts that preserve every analytically useful detail while stripping every identifying one. Once you have that skill, you can ask any Ai any question about your life without ever exposing yourself. That is the muscle. Build it once, use it forever.
How to Redact — The Practical Method
1. Use an anonymized email address. Set up a fresh Gmail or ProtonMail or anything you like, under an alias. Do not link it to your phone number if the service does not require it. This is the only address you ever use to talk to the Lab.
2. Pick an alias and stick with it. Anything. "Worker-12" works fine. Use the alias on every form, every email, every document. Consistency lets us track your case across submissions without ever knowing who you are.
3. Replace identifying details with categories or ranges.
→ "John Smith, born March 14, 1962" becomes "Worker-12, age range 60-65"
→ "123 Main Street, Belmont, NH" becomes "Northeast US, small town"
→ "Bank of America account 4421-9988-7733" becomes "Major US bank, primary checking"
→ "$47,832 in credit card debt" becomes "approximately $45-50K in credit card debt"
→ "Dr. Sarah Chen at Mass General" becomes "PCP at a major academic medical center"
4. For documents — black out, do not just cover. If you take a screenshot or scan a document, use a PDF editor to black out the identifying fields (most PDF tools call this "redact" or "black out"). Do not just put a white box on top. White boxes can be removed. Properly redacted black bars cannot.
5. Strip metadata before you send. Photos and documents carry hidden metadata (EXIF, author fields, location data). Most modern tools have a "remove personal information" or "remove metadata" option before export. On a Mac, "Quick Actions → Remove Metadata." On Windows, right-click → Properties → Details → Remove Properties. For PDFs, Adobe Acrobat has "Sanitize Document" under the Protect menu.
6. When in doubt, retype. The single safest method, for short documents, is to read the original and retype the relevant content into a fresh blank file, replacing every identifier with a category as you go. Slower. Bulletproof.
7. Or — invent the situation entirely. You do not have to use your real circumstances at all. The Lab works just as well on a made-up case that resembles yours. Many of the most useful tests start with a fictional household whose details happen to be very, very close to the user's own. We will never know the difference. Neither will any Ai. The reasoning is the same either way.
What You Should Never Send
Anywhere. Not to us, not to any Ai, not to any cloud document, not to any tool. Burn this into memory:
- Your full legal name
- Your home address
- Your Social Security number, in whole or in part
- Your full date of birth
- Your bank, brokerage, or credit card account numbers
- Your medical record numbers or insurance member IDs
- Photos of your driver's license, passport, or any government ID
- Photos of your physical signature
- The names of your children, your spouse, or other family members
- The names of your specific doctors, lawyers, accountants, or advisors
- Your phone number
- Your employer's name (use industry/role/size instead)
None of these are needed for any analysis we or any other Ai will do. If a tool ever asks you for any of these to do a piece of analysis, that tool is wrong for the job. Find another one.
A Quick Mental Test
Before you send anything to the Lab — or to any Ai, anywhere — ask yourself this question:
"If this document leaked publicly tomorrow, could anyone trace it back to me?"
If the answer is yes, keep redacting. If the answer is no, you are ready.
One More Thing
The Lab is built around the assumption that you are the security. Not us. Not any platform. Not any promise. You. The muscle you build here is yours, permanently, and it is one of the most valuable things you will own in the next decade. Every person who learns this becomes harder to exploit, harder to surveil, harder to manipulate, and easier to thrive. That is the real product. The case work is the practice ground.
Take your time. Read this again if you need to. Come back to it whenever you submit something new. When you are ready, the Intake is below.
Not ready yet? Back to the Lab entrance
Anonymity is a skill. The skill is yours forever.
DB Labs — Redaction Briefing
David F. Brochu & Edo de Peregrine