Search the Atlas

Search risks, controls, and glossary terms

MediumPrompt RetentionDemonstrated

Prompt & conversation retention/leakage

Privacy & Data Protection

Description

User prompts/conversations are logged, retained, or sent to third-party providers, creating leakage and compliance exposure.

Example scenario

Customer chat data is sent to an external LLM provider that retains it for training, breaching DPDP.

Real-world evidenceDemonstrated

The Italian Data Protection Authority (Garante) suspended ChatGPT in 2023 partly on grounds that OpenAI could not demonstrate a technically valid erasure mechanism for personal data embedded in model weights — confirming the technical inability is a real compliance gap in production AI. Machine unlearning methods exist but remain unreliable, and no financial-sector AI system has been confirmed to satisfy GDPR Article 17 at the model-weight level.

Primary mitigations

  • Data residency & no-train guarantees
  • retention limits
  • PII redaction before logging
  • tenant-controlled retention
  • encryption.

Detection signals

Retention-policy audits; third-party data-flow review; PII-in-logs scanning.

Mitigating controls

8
Non-agentic controls

Related risks in Privacy & Data Protection