Cohere Data Handling and Privacy

Overview

Decide what may cross the provider boundary from the signed agreement and application purpose, then enforce that decision before each request.

Prerequisites

• The target repository, runtime, environment, and accountable owner
• An approved Cohere team and key for any live verification
• Current quality, security, privacy, capacity, and change-control requirements

Tool Discipline

Use Read, Glob, and Grep to inspect code, configuration, and evidence. Use WebFetch only for current Cohere primary documentation. Use Write or Edit only when the user requested implementation and the exact target files are known; never write credentials or customer content.

Current Contract

• Cohere's public privacy policy distinguishes enterprise Customer Data from general personal information and points to enterprise commitments.
• Do not infer retention, residency, training use, deletion, or subprocessors from a generic policy when a contract governs the workload.
• Embeddings and logs can encode sensitive information even when raw text is absent.
• Data minimization and tenant authorization must happen before Chat, Embed, Rerank, or tool calls.

Authentication

Use an environment-specific key injected from an approved secret manager. Never print, persist, commit, or place CO_API_KEY in an example. Confirm access with the least costly bounded operation appropriate to the task, and treat key creation, rotation, revocation, role changes, and production-capacity requests as owner-approved actions.

Instructions

1. Classify inputs, retrieved documents, outputs, embeddings, logs, and tool data by tenant and jurisdiction.
2. Map each data class to the signed terms, approved region, retention, deletion, access, and incident requirements.
3. Block disallowed classes and minimize, tokenize, or redact approved inputs before the provider call.
4. Apply tenant filters before retrieval and keep document identifiers safe for citation auditing.
5. Configure logs and caches with allowlisted fields, encryption, access control, and deletion tests.
6. Produce a data-flow record and obtain privacy or legal approval for unresolved contractual claims.

Approval Boundaries

Do not expose or rotate keys, change Cohere Team roles, accept commercial terms, enable sensitive production data, increase spend or capacity, switch production models, send a support bundle, or execute model-proposed side effects without the accountable owner's approval. Keep diagnosis read-only unless implementation was requested.

Output

Return the resolved API and model contract, files or settings inspected, evidence collected, validation result, remaining risk, owner, and rollback or next action. Redact keys, authorization headers, prompts, retrieved documents, embeddings, customer identifiers, and unrestricted environment output.

Error Handling

Condition	Response
Terms unavailable	Block sensitive production use until the governing agreement is identified.
PII detected	Apply the approved transformation or reject the request.
Cross-tenant data	Stop processing and invoke the data incident procedure.
Deletion unverified	Do not claim compliance; test each controlled storage layer.

Examples

Use this compact handoff shape to keep the selected scope, validation evidence, and operational result reviewable.

Input:

data=customer-support; class=confidential; jurisdiction=EU; contract=enterprise

Expected handoff:

purpose=approved; fields=minimized; retention=mapped; review=recorded

Resources

• Skill-specific official documentation
• Privacy policy
• Cohere security