Protecting Your Company Data When Using LLMs

The Union

While LLMs offer undeniable benefits, integrating them into the workplace poses significant risks to company data. Here’s why:
Data Leakage: It’s easy for employees to paste confidential company information into LLM prompts inadvertently. This could include anything an employee can access: financial reports, trade secrets, customer data in text, documents, or even data in spreadsheets.
Ownership Concerns: When company data is used to create content using LLMs, there’s a risk of losing ownership rights or control over intellectual property. Who owns the content created by LLMs? The company that provides the data or the LLM provider?
Compliance Issues: The unregulated use of LLMs can lead to costly violations of data protection regulations like GDPR, CCPA, and others. Companies have a legal obligation to protect sensitive customer and employee data, and a breach caused by mishandling information within an LLM could have serious repercussions.
Three LLM Usage Scenarios & Why You Should Be Worried
The privacy and data security risks associated with LLMs vary depending on how your employees access and utilize the models and services. Three of the most common scenarios and the specific concerns they raise include:
Scenario 1: Free GenAI/LLM Accounts
Free and readily accessible GenAI tools and LLM interfaces are great at helping employees jumpstart content or edit existing text. However, this ease of use comes at a steep price. When employees turn to these free options for work-related tasks, often for convenience or out of unfamiliarity with company policy, sensitive data is put at extreme risk.
Data Leakage at its Worst: Free LLM accounts offer minimal to no safeguards for your data. Anything pasted into these interfaces, from client emails to financial projections, is essentially out of your control.
Training Future Models: Most alarmingly, many free LLM providers openly state they use user inputs to train their models. This means your confidential company information could become part of the knowledge base of a publicly accessible AI, potentially exposed to competitors or malicious actors.
Scenario 2: Paid Enterprise LLM Accounts
While paid enterprise accounts come with improved terms of service and stronger data protection promises, they do not guarantee absolute security.
Risk of Leakage Persists: Even with contractual assurances, there remains a risk that your data could be unintentionally exposed due to human error or vulnerabilities in the provider’s systems.
Training Concerns: Although many providers commit to not training their models on your data, there’s often no way to verify this claim independently. Your sensitive information could still be used to enhance the capabilities of LLMs, potentially benefiting your competitors.
Scenario 3: Hosting Your Own LLMs
This scenario represents the most security and control. By hosting open-source LLMs within a secure Krista tenant, you maintain absolute ownership and oversight of your data.
No Data Leaves Your Account: Your company’s information never interacts with external LLM providers, eliminating the risk of data leakage or unauthorized use.
Full Control: You have complete authority over how the LLM is configured, trained, and used, ensuring that it aligns perfectly with your organization’s specific security and compliance requirements.
Peace of Mind: This approach provides the highest reassurance that your data remains confidential, secure, and entirely within your control.
Implementing this technology within your organization is critical, and the risks associated with how you and your employees interact with LLMs vary depending on the use case.
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