Data Privacy in AI Language Models for Enterprises

AI is not failing because of bad ideas; it’s "failing" at enterprise scale because of two big gaps: 👉 Workforce Preparation 👉 Data Security for AI While I speak globally on both topics in depth, today I want to educate us on what it takes to secure data for AI—because 70–82% of AI projects pause or get cancelled at POC/MVP stage (source: #Gartner, #MIT). Why? One of the biggest reasons is a lack of readiness at the data layer. So let’s make it simple - there are 7 phases to securing data for AI—and each phase has direct business risk if ignored. 🔹 Phase 1: Data Sourcing Security - Validating the origin, ownership, and licensing rights of all ingested data. Why It Matters: You can’t build scalable AI with data you don’t own or can’t trace. 🔹 Phase 2: Data Infrastructure Security - Ensuring data warehouses, lakes, and pipelines that support your AI models are hardened and access-controlled. Why It Matters: Unsecured data environments are easy targets for bad actors making you exposed to data breaches, IP theft, and model poisoning. 🔹 Phase 3: Data In-Transit Security - Protecting data as it moves across internal or external systems, especially between cloud, APIs, and vendors. Why It Matters: Intercepted training data = compromised models. Think of it as shipping cash across town in an armored truck—or on a bicycle—your choice. 🔹 Phase 4: API Security for Foundational Models - Safeguarding the APIs you use to connect with LLMs and third-party GenAI platforms (OpenAI, Anthropic, etc.). Why It Matters: Unmonitored API calls can leak sensitive data into public models or expose internal IP. This isn’t just tech debt. It’s reputational and regulatory risk. 🔹 Phase 5: Foundational Model Protection - Defending your proprietary models and fine-tunes from external inference, theft, or malicious querying. Why It Matters: Prompt injection attacks are real. And your enterprise-trained model? It’s a business asset. You lock your office at night—do the same with your models. 🔹 Phase 6: Incident Response for AI Data Breaches - Having predefined protocols for breaches, hallucinations, or AI-generated harm—who’s notified, who investigates, how damage is mitigated. Why It Matters: AI-related incidents are happening. Legal needs response plans. Cyber needs escalation tiers. 🔹 Phase 7: CI/CD for Models (with Security Hooks) - Continuous integration and delivery pipelines for models, embedded with testing, governance, and version-control protocols. Why It Matter: Shipping models like software means risk comes faster—and so must detection. Governance must be baked into every deployment sprint. Want your AI strategy to succeed past MVP? Focus and lock down the data. #AI #DataSecurity #AILeadership #Cybersecurity #FutureOfWork #ResponsibleAI #SolRashidi #Data #Leadership

This Stanford study examined how six major AI companies (Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, Meta, Microsoft, and Amazon) handle user data from chatbot conversations.  Here are the main privacy concerns. 👀 All six companies use chat data for training by default, though some allow opt-out 👀 Data retention is often indefinite, with personal information stored long-term 👀 Cross-platform data merging occurs at multi-product companies (Google, Meta, Microsoft, Amazon) 👀 Children's data is handled inconsistently, with most companies not adequately protecting minors 👀 Limited transparency in privacy policies, which are complex and hard to understand and often lack crucial details about actual practices Practical Takeaways for Acceptable Use Policy and Training for nonprofits in using generative AI: ✅ Assume anything you share will be used for training - sensitive information, uploaded files, health details, biometric data, etc. ✅ Opt out when possible - proactively disable data collection for training (Meta is the one where you cannot) ✅ Information cascades through ecosystems - your inputs can lead to inferences that affect ads, recommendations, and potentially insurance or other third parties ✅ Special concern for children's data - age verification and consent protections are inconsistent Some questions to consider in acceptable use policies and to incorporate in any training. ❓ What types of sensitive information might your nonprofit staff  share with generative AI?  ❓ Does your nonprofit currently specifically identify what is considered “sensitive information” (beyond PID) and should not be shared with GenerativeAI ? Is this incorporated into training? ❓ Are you working with children, people with health conditions, or others whose data could be particularly harmful if leaked or misused? ❓ What would be the consequences if sensitive information or strategic organizational data ended up being used to train AI models? How might this affect trust, compliance, or your mission? How is this communicated in training and policy? Across the board, the Stanford research points that developers’ privacy policies lack essential information about their practices. They recommend policymakers and developers address data privacy challenges posed by LLM-powered chatbots through comprehensive federal privacy regulation, affirmative opt-in for model training, and filtering personal information from chat inputs by default. “We need to promote innovation in privacy-preserving AI, so that user privacy isn’t an afterthought." How are you advocating for privacy-preserving AI? How are you educating your staff to navigate this challenge? https://lnkd.in/g3RmbEwD

Before diving headfirst into AI, companies need to define what data privacy means to them in order to use GenAI safely. After decades of harvesting and storing data, many tech companies have created vast troves of the stuff - and not all of it is safe to use when training new GenAI models. Most companies can easily recognize obvious examples of Personally Identifying Information (PII) like Social Security numbers (SSNs) - but what about home addresses, phone numbers, or even information like how many kids a customer has? These details can be just as critical to ensure newly built GenAI products don’t compromise their users' privacy - or safety - but once this information has entered an LLM, it can be really difficult to excise it. To safely build the next generation of AI, companies need to consider some key issues: ⚠️Defining Sensitive Data: Companies need to decide what they consider sensitive beyond the obvious. Personally identifiable information (PII) covers more than just SSNs and contact information - it can include any data that paints a detailed picture of an individual and needs to be redacted to protect customers. 🔒Using Tools to Ensure Privacy: Ensuring privacy in AI requires a range of tools that can help tech companies process, redact, and safeguard sensitive information. Without these tools in place, they risk exposing critical data in their AI models. 🏗️ Building a Framework for Privacy: Redacting sensitive data isn’t just a one-time process; it needs to be a cornerstone of any company’s data management strategy as they continue to scale AI efforts. Since PII is so difficult to remove from an LLM once added, GenAI companies need to devote resources to making sure it doesn’t enter their databases in the first place. Ultimately, AI is only as safe as the data you feed into it. Companies need a clear, actionable plan to protect their customers - and the time to implement it is now.

Generative AI is reshaping industries, but as Large Language Models (LLMs) continue to evolve, they bring a critical challenge: how do we teach them to forget? Forget what? Our sensitive data. In their default state, LLMs are designed to retain patterns from training data, enabling them to generate remarkable outputs. However, this capability raises privacy and security concerns. Why Forgetting Matters? Compliance with Privacy Laws: Regulations like GDPR and CCPA mandate the right to be forgotten. Training LLMs to erase specific data aligns with these legal requirements. Minimizing Data Exposure: Retaining unnecessary or sensitive information increases risks in case of breaches. Forgetting protects users and organizations alike. Building User Trust: Transparent mechanisms to delete user data foster confidence in AI solutions. Techniques to Enable Forgetting 🔹 Selective Fine-Tuning: Retraining models to exclude specific data sets without degrading performance. 🔹 Differential Privacy: Ensuring individual data points are obscured during training to prevent memorization. 🔹 Memory Augmentation: Using external memory modules where specific records can be updated or deleted without affecting the core model. 🔹 Data Tokenization: Encapsulating sensitive information in reversible tokens that can be erased independently. Balancing forgetfulness with functionality is complex. LLMs must retain enough context for accuracy while ensuring sensitive information isn’t permanently embedded. By prioritizing privacy, we can shape a future in which AI doesn’t just work for us—it works with our values. How are you addressing privacy concerns in your AI initiatives? Let’s discuss! #GenerativeAI #AIPrivacy #LLM #DataSecurity #EthicalAI Successive Digital

Your trade secrets just walked out the front door … and you might have held it open. No employee—except the rare bad actor—means to leak sensitive company data. But it happens, especially when people are using generative AI tools like ChatGPT to “polish a proposal,” “summarize a contract,” or “write code faster.” But here’s the problem: unless you’re using ChatGPT Team or Enterprise, it doesn’t treat your data as confidential. According to OpenAI’s own Terms of Use: “We do not use Content that you provide to or receive from our API to develop or improve our Services.” But don‘t forget to read the fine print: that protection does not apply unless you’re on a business plan. For regular users, ChatGPT can use your prompts, including anything you type or upload, to train its large language models. Translation: That “confidential strategy doc” you asked ChatGPT to summarize? That “internal pricing sheet” you wanted to reword for a client? That “source code” you needed help debugging? ☠️ Poof. Trade secret status, gone. ☠️ If you don’t take reasonable measures to maintain the secrecy of your trade secrets, they will lose their protection as such. So how do you protect your business? 1. Write an AI Acceptable Use Policy. Be explicit: what’s allowed, what’s off limits, and what’s confidential. 2. Educate employees. Most folks don’t realize that ChatGPT isn’t a secure sandbox. Make sure they do. 3. Control tool access. Invest in an enterprise solution with confidentiality protections. 4. Audit and enforce. Treat ChatGPT the way you treat Dropbox or Google Drive, as tools that can leak data if unmanaged. 5. Update your confidentiality and trade secret agreements. Include restrictions on AI disclosures. AI isn’t going anywhere. The companies that get ahead of its risk will be the ones still standing when the dust settles. If you don’t have an AI policy and a plan to protect your data, you’re not just behind—you’re exposed.

Privacy isn’t a policy layer in AI. It’s a design constraint. The new EDPB guidance on LLMs doesn’t just outline risks. It gives builders, buyers, and decision-makers a usable blueprint for engineering privacy - not just documenting it. The key shift? → Yesterday: Protect inputs → Today: Audit the entire pipeline → Tomorrow: Design for privacy observability at runtime The real risk isn’t malicious intent. It’s silent propagation through opaque systems. In most LLM systems, sensitive data leaks not because someone intended harm but because no one mapped the flows, tested outputs, or scoped where memory could resurface prior inputs. This guidance helps close that gap. And here’s how to apply it: For Developers: • Map how personal data enters, transforms, and persists • Identify points of memorization, retention, or leakage • Use the framework to embed mitigation into each phase: pretraining, fine-tuning, inference, RAG, feedback For Users & Deployers: • Don’t treat LLMs as black boxes. Ask if data is stored, recalled, or used to retrain • Evaluate vendor claims with structured questions from the report • Build internal governance that tracks model behaviors over time For Decision-Makers & Risk Owners: • Use this to complement your DPIAs with LLM-specific threat modeling • Shift privacy thinking from legal compliance to architectural accountability • Set organizational standards for “commercial-safe” LLM usage This isn’t about slowing innovation. It’s about future-proofing it. Because the next phase of AI scale won’t just be powered by better models. It will be constrained and enabled by how seriously we engineer for trust. Thanks European Data Protection Board, Isabel Barberá H/T Peter Slattery, PhD

Generative AI offers transformative potential, but how do we harness it without compromising crucial data privacy? It's not an afterthought — it's central to the strategy. Evaluating the right approach depends heavily on specific privacy goals and data sensitivity. One starting point, with strong vendor contracts, is using the LLM context window directly. For larger datasets, Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) scales well. RAG retrieves relevant information at query time to augment the prompt, which helps keep private data out of the LLM's core training dataset. However, optimizing RAG across diverse content types and meeting user expectations for structured, precise answers can be challenging. At the other extreme lies Self-Hosting LLMs. This offers maximum control but introduces significant deployment and maintenance overhead, especially when aiming for the capabilities of large foundation models. For ultra-sensitive use cases, this might be the only viable path. Distilling larger models for specific tasks can mitigate some deployment complexity, but the core challenges of self-hosting remain. Look at Apple Intelligence as a prime example. Their strategy prioritizes user privacy through On-Device Processing, minimizing external data access. While not explicitly labeled RAG, the architecture — with its semantic index, orchestration, and LLM interaction — strongly resembles a sophisticated RAG system, proving privacy and capability can coexist. At Egnyte, we believe robust AI solutions must uphold data security. For us, data privacy and fine-grained, authorized access aren't just compliance hurdles; they are innovation drivers. Looking ahead to advanced Agent-to-Agent AI interactions, this becomes even more critical. Autonomous agents require a bedrock of trust, built on rigorous access controls and privacy-centric design, to interact securely and effectively. This foundation is essential for unlocking AI's future potential responsibly.

The EDPB recently published a report on AI Privacy Risks and Mitigations in LLMs.   This is one of the most practical and detailed resources I've seen from the EDPB, with extensive guidance for developers and deployers. The report walks through privacy risks associated with LLMs across the AI lifecycle, from data collection and training to deployment and retirement, and offers practical tips for identifying, measuring, and mitigating risks.   Here's a quick summary of some of the key mitigations mentioned in the report:   For providers: • Fine-tune LLMs on curated, high-quality datasets and limit the scope of model outputs to relevant and up-to-date information. • Use robust anonymisation techniques and automated tools to detect and remove personal data from training data. • Apply input filters and user warnings during deployment to discourage users from entering personal data, as well as automated detection methods to flag or anonymise sensitive input data before it is processed. • Clearly inform users about how their data will be processed through privacy policies, instructions, warning or disclaimers in the user interface. • Encrypt user inputs and outputs during transmission and storage to protect data from unauthorized access. • Protect against prompt injection and jailbreaking by validating inputs, monitoring LLMs for abnormal input behaviour, and limiting the amount of text a user can input. • Apply content filtering and human review processes to flag sensitive or inappropriate outputs. • Limit data logging and provide configurable options to deployers regarding log retention. • Offer easy-to-use opt-in/opt-out options for users whose feedback data might be used for retraining.   For deployers: • Enforce strong authentication to restrict access to the input interface and protect session data. • Mitigate adversarial attacks by adding a layer for input sanitization and filtering, monitoring and logging user queries to detect unusual patterns. • Work with providers to ensure they do not retain or misuse sensitive input data. • Guide users to avoid sharing unnecessary personal data through clear instructions, training and warnings. • Educate employees and end users on proper usage, including the appropriate use of outputs and phishing techniques that could trick individuals into revealing sensitive information. • Ensure employees and end users avoid overreliance on LLMs for critical or high-stakes decisions without verification, and ensure outputs are reviewed by humans before implementation or dissemination. • Securely store outputs and restrict access to authorised personnel and systems.   This is a rare example where the EDPB strikes a good balance between practical safeguards and legal expectations. Link to the report included in the comments.   #AIprivacy #LLMs #dataprotection #AIgovernance #EDPB #privacybydesign #GDPR

Your AI models are learning from your most sensitive data. Here's why that should worry you. Most companies don’t stop to ask: what happens to that data once it’s inside the model? 🤯 That’s where Privacy-Preserving Machine Learning (PPML) comes in. It lets you train powerful AI models without ever exposing your raw data. Here's how it works: ⭐ Differential Privacy - Adds mathematical noise to your data so individual records can't be identified, but the AI still learns useful patterns.  E.g. Apple uses this to collect iOS usage stats without exposing individuals. ⭐ Federated Learning - Trains models across multiple devices or organizations without centralizing the data anywhere. E.g Google trains Gboard’s next-word predictions across millions of devices without centralizing keystrokes. ⭐ Homomorphic Encryption - Lets AI process encrypted data without ever decrypting it. E.g. Imagine a bank detecting fraud on encrypted transactions without decrypting them. ⭐ Secure Multi-party Computation - Multiple parties can jointly train a model without sharing their raw data with each other. E.g. Healthcare orgs collaborate on drug discovery without ever exchanging patient records. In a world where everyone is trying to build AI apps and AI native workflows, the companies that figure out PPML first will have a massive competitive advantage and will be able to: ✅ Tap into more data sources ✅ Collaborate across industries ✅ Earn customer trust 👉 What’s your biggest privacy concern with how AI is being used today?