Self-hosted AI is a great start. It's not enough.

If the AI runs on our servers, personal data never leaves our control, so there's no privacy risk.

GDPR requires data minimization, meaning you may not process more personal data than strictly necessary, regardless of where it's hosted. If your RAG pipeline ingests social security numbers, salary figures, or health data that the model doesn't need, you're violating GDPR Article 5(1)(c) even on your own hardware.

Sanitica's pseudonymize mode solves this by replacing names with consistent aliases (e.g. “Individual-A7”) so your AI keeps full context without processing real identities. Data minimization, satisfied.

Our company has strict IT policies. Our employees would never use unauthorized AI tools.

Research shows that over 70% of employees use external AI tools without approval. It's human nature. People choose the fastest, most convenient tool available. Even organizations with their own AI infrastructure have employees who open ChatGPT in their browser because it's quicker. Policies alone cannot solve this.

Sanitica's full clean mode on shared folders ensures that even when employees copy-paste documents into external AI, the sensitive data is already gone.

We redact sensitive text with black boxes before sharing documents. That's enough.

AI doesn't read pixels on a screen. It reads the underlying binary data of the document. A black rectangle in a PDF hides text visually, but the data remains fully intact in the text layer beneath. Any AI tool, text extractor, or even a simple copy-paste can retrieve the “redacted” information.

All three Sanitica modes operate at the binary level. Whether removing, pseudonymizing, or stripping metadata, the data is destroyed in the document's source code. No text layer, no residual data, no way back.

We're a small company. GDPR and AI regulations don't really apply to us.

The NIS2 directive covers organizations in energy, transport, water supply, manufacturing, and more, many of which are small and medium-sized businesses. GDPR applies to every organization that processes personal data, regardless of size. A 20-person company faces the same legal obligations as a multinational.

Sanitica's three modes scale from a 10-person company to a multinational. Full Clean for external sharing, Pseudonymize for internal AI, Metadata Only for client documents.

Our team reviews documents before they go to AI systems. Manual oversight is sufficient.

Manual review does not scale. Organizations process thousands of documents per month. Each document can contain hidden metadata, tracked changes, embedded comments, and dozens of PII data points. One overlooked meeting note with a client name in the metadata is enough for a breach. Human errors are inevitable at volume.

Sanitica automates all three modes: full clean, pseudonymize, and metadata-only, processing thousands of documents per month with zero manual effort and zero human error.

We send emails with personal data all the time. Uploading a document to AI is essentially the same thing.

Email has a clear GDPR legal basis. AI does not. Here is why they are fundamentally different:

We set up sensitivity labels in Microsoft Purview, banned external AI tools, and told everyone to use Copilot only. GDPR compliance sorted.

Purview controls who can access data. It does not control what is in the data. These are fundamentally different problems.

When an employee asks Copilot to summarize a SharePoint folder, Copilot reads every document that employee has access to: names, national IDs, salary figures, tracked changes, hidden comments. Sensitivity labels don't remove a single character. And if you restrict access so aggressively that Copilot can't reach anything useful, you've paid for an expensive tool that can't do its job.

GDPR Article 5(1)(c) requires data minimization: you may not process more personal data than the task requires. A summary request does not need social security numbers. Article 25 goes further and explicitly names pseudonymization as a recommended technical measure. Purview offers neither.

Sanitica's pseudonymize mode is what makes Copilot truly safe. Real names become consistent aliases, context is preserved, and Copilot works exactly as intended, without violating data minimization. Read the full breakdown →