Data

What has to happen to a corpus before you hand it to anything.

Most of what identifies a person does not sit in a column. It sits in free text — a comment, a note, a written exchange — which is exactly what gets sent to a model. A clean schema tells you nothing about that.

The argument of this series is one of ordering. Governance applied after the model has already seen the data is documentation, not control. Whatever has entered the model cannot be recalled: logged prompt, built index, cached context, every stage keeps a copy.

So the work happens upstream, in the architecture, not in the procedure. And not in trust.

Notes in this series

• August 28 Anonymize before the model, not after

  Stripping direct identifiers is necessary and not sufficient. Whatever has entered the model cannot be recalled.

• September 10 The failure that raises no error

  A scanned document produces text, so a pipeline that expects text works. It also works when it has read only part of the document, and it says nothing.