Reading a vendor’s trust page: what the words actually mean
Every AI vendor has a security page now. Most of it is true and says less than it appears to. Here is how to read one in five minutes.
Every AI product has a page headed Security, Trust or Privacy. It is written to be reassuring and it is usually accurate. The skill is in noticing what it does not say, and that comes down to four phrases.
Four phrases and what they mean
« Encrypted in transit and at rest. » True of essentially all professional software since about 2015. It tells you nothing about who at the vendor can read your data, which is the question you actually have. Encryption at rest does not mean encrypted from the vendor.
« We do not train on your data. » Good, and check who « we » is. If the product calls a model from another company, the commitment you need is from that company, for your tier. Ask which provider sits behind the feature — the question from March.
« Hosted in Europe. » Often means the application and your stored documents. It frequently does not mean the model inference, which may run elsewhere. These are separate sentences and they are rarely both written down. The 13 January post on « private GPT » is the long version of this.
« SOC 2 / ISO 27001. » Real and worth something: it means the vendor has documented processes and someone checked them. It is not a statement about where your data goes or what the model does with it. A certified company can still send your text to three countries.
The three questions the page will not answer
- Which countries does the text of my question pass through?
- How long is it retained, and by whom at each hop?
- What happens to it if I close the account?
Send those three in an email. A vendor who has thought about their architecture answers in a day with specifics. A vendor who replies by linking you back to the trust page has told you the page is the whole of their thinking.
What good looks like
The strongest sign is a subprocessor list: a named table of which companies touch your data and for what. Few SME-focused vendors publish one. The ones that do are usually the ones worth talking to, because publishing it means they know the answer themselves.