Security and Compliance

What the Outpost discloses, what stays on your machine, and what we can do

The Outpost runs on your network; source files and the search index live on your machine. You decide per folder on the Outpost what meinGPT gets to see in order to answer a question — and that setting is what this page is about.

Attention

On-premise does not mean "nothing leaves". It means: only what you release. An answer without the passage it rests on would be no answer, so at minimum the matching passage travels to meinGPT with every question. How much more is up to you.

The release level — the one setting that matters

Every shared Outpost folder has a release level. It decides what leaves the machine when someone asks a question.

LevelWhat travels to meinGPT
Text onlyThe matching passages, the file name and the complete text of the relevant documents. The default.
Original filesEverything from “Text only” plus the file itself. Needed when people should verify an answer against the original, or reuse a template.

A lower level that released only individual passages is gone: whoever may read one passage can ask a second question for the next one and assemble the document that way. It cost answer quality and protected nothing. Existing data pools still set to it keep working unchanged.

It is set on the Outpost, per folder — in the program on the machine, under Shares → open the folder. Not in the web console.

Until recently it was the other way round: a dropdown in the platform, one level for every folder on a machine, operated by someone who cannot see the disk. Whoever decides that \\fileserver\HR should be searchable is the same person who knows whether its files may leave the building — and they are at the machine, not in a browser.

The folder reports its level with every folder report, and meinGPT enforces it: requests asking for more than the folder releases are refused before anything is read.

What an update does not change

A folder bound before this change reports no level. It is treated as text only — the careful side. No folder starts releasing files because of an update.

The connection

Outbound only

The Outpost opens the connection itself. No inbound port, no firewall rule, no service exposed to the internet.

A key per organization

The tunnel is signed with a key that belongs to your organization alone — not with a shared secret.

Technically it is an outbound, TLS-encrypted WebSocket connection to the meinGPT Bridge — not a VPN. Your network team has nothing to open; outbound HTTPS is enough. Corporate proxies and private root certificates are supported, and the setup assistant checks them.

What stays on the machine

The platform cannot set any of these. They exist only on the device, by design: if the cloud could add a folder, the cloud could read anything on that machine.

  • Which folders are shared. This is the actual boundary.
  • Which local services are reachable, and with which credentials. The password is never transmitted to meinGPT.
  • The root certificate for your TLS inspection.
  • Where embeddings go — the address of the model that turns your documents into vectors.

What we can do

The Outpost updates itself from storage we operate, signed with a key we hold. That carries an uncomfortable but honest limitation: we could ship a version that behaves differently from the one described here. Everything on this page is, today, a commitment rather than a technical proof.

To close that gap, turn auto-update off and pin a version you have reviewed. The price is that you apply updates yourself — in exchange, nothing rests on our restraint any more.

Revoking access

Both directions, with the same effect:

  • In the web console ("Unpair device"): the secret is rotated and outstanding pairing codes are deleted. The right move when a machine is stolen, decommissioned, or no longer reachable.
  • On the device ("Unpair this device"): the same — the Outpost revokes itself at meinGPT before clearing anything locally. If meinGPT cannot be reached, the app says so rather than reporting success, and offers "Disconnect locally" instead — access then stays valid at meinGPT and has to be revoked in the web console.

Both are recorded in your organization's audit log.

Further reading

Note

Outpost-specific privacy: more on the architecture and how your data is handled is in the Outpost privacy documentation.

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