Glossary
What is zero retention?
Zero retention is a guarantee that raw prompts and responses are never persisted — only structural counters are kept.
Definition
Zero retention — short definition
Zero retention: Zero retention is a guarantee that raw prompts and responses are never persisted — only structural counters are kept.
Why it matters
Why this matters
Most data-exposure incidents around LLMs are storage incidents — logs, traces or backups containing prompt bodies. Zero retention eliminates that class of risk by design.
How it works
How it works
Step 1
In-memory only
Prompts and responses live in the request lifecycle, not in durable storage.
Step 2
Structural metrics
Token counts, latencies and masked entity types are captured instead of bodies.
Step 3
Auditable pipeline
The observability sink rejects any payload that includes raw bodies.
Implementation
Learn how this works in Privian
From definition to implementation, docs and architecture — the same idea at different layers.
FAQ
Frequently asked questions
- What is actually stored?
- Structural data only: token counts, latency, model identifiers, masked entity types. No prompt or response bodies.
- Does zero retention apply to the provider too?
- It applies to Privian. Whether the provider retains data depends on their terms and your account configuration with them.
- How is zero retention verified?
- By auditing the storage layer and the observability pipeline. The gateway has no code path that writes prompt or response bodies to durable storage.