Prompt Security: Protecting Your Company's Sensitive Information
Every prompt can contain business secrets or personal data. Best practices to govern AI usage without slowing down your teams.
In 2023, several major companies made headlines after employees pasted confidential source code or strategic meeting notes into public chatbots. The reflex is understandable: AI saves time, and the boundary between trivial and sensitive data is not always clear in the heat of the moment.
The main risk of consumer tools lies in their business model: conversations can be retained, analysed, and, depending on the terms of use, exploited to improve models. A confidential piece of information submitted today can theoretically influence answers provided tomorrow to other users. For business secrets, client data, or information subject to professional secrecy, this risk is unacceptable.
The first measure is organisational: establish a clear, short AI usage policy. Three categories are often sufficient: freely usable data (public information, generic texts), data usable only within the company's private instance (business data, internal documents), and data prohibited from any AI processing without prior validation (medical data, nominal legal files, trade secrets).
The second measure is technical: provide teams with an official tool that makes shadow IT unnecessary. If the company provides an AI interface that is high-performing, private, and approved by management, employees no longer have a reason to use their personal accounts on public services. This is the most effective approach against data leakage through prompts: replacing prohibition with a better alternative.
The third measure is control: knowing who uses what. An enterprise platform offers aggregated usage statistics and, for organisations that require it, audit logs. It is not about monitoring the content of everyone's conversations, but rather about detecting abnormal usage patterns and documenting compliance for clients and regulators.
Finally, encryption remains the foundation: TLS 1.3 in transit, AES-256 at rest, secrets managed outside the code. With a dedicated instance per company, any potential compromise is restricted to a single tenant, unlike shared architectures where a breach can expose the data of thousands of organisations at once.