Reading · 8 min · Lesson 7 of 7
Access control and hosting
The assistant must never know more than the person asking.
A RAG assistant must respect the same permissions as your document systems. If a salary table is visible only to HR, the assistant must not quote it to anyone else. The reliable way to do this is to filter retrieval by the user's permissions before anything reaches the model, not to ask the model to keep secrets.
Hosting matters too. For personal data and confidential documents, decide where the index and the model run: EU hosting, a data processing agreement and a clear answer on whether prompts are stored or used for training. These questions belong in the project plan, not in a later security review.
Finally, log questions, retrieved sources and answers. Logs let you audit what the assistant revealed, spot gaps in the content and build the test set that keeps quality from drifting as documents change.
Key takeaways
- Filter retrieval by user permissions before the model sees anything.
- Decide on hosting and data processing terms at the start.
- Logs support audits, content fixes and quality testing.