Preserving privacy with metadata extractors, and not only

Augmenting LLMs with your proprietary data – which, by the way, may belong to your customers in many instances – can prove to be a challenging task in terms of data privacy. While a cloud based LLM solution can enrich your proprietary data and offer numerous advantages, uncontrolled data sharing with external parties can quickly turn into a legal, security, and regulatory nightmare.

Although the topic of data privacy is more stringent in the case of indexing and querying, utilizing metadata extractors can also raise potential privacy concerns to be aware of. Therefore, I believe a brief warning is required already.

Since most extractors rely on processing content via LLMs to generate metadata, this means your actual data gets transmitted to and analyzed by external cloud services.

There is a risk of exposure or mishandling of any personal or confidential information contained in this data, whether due...