Forage Safety Principles
3 min read · Last updated · Page version 2
What is true today
- Forage deletes nothing. It edits no document in SharePoint or in the archive, and it never writes to Squirrel's record.
- A content label is never a retention outcome. Recognising that a document contains payment card numbers says nothing about how long it should be kept or when it should go.
- Every content rule can be dry run before it is switched on. The dry run is offered rather than required.
The one change Forage can cause in storage
Where Squirrel has placed an archived file in Azure's offline archive tier, Forage asks Azure to bring it back online before reading it. Azure charges for this, it can take up to a day, and Forage does not return the file to the offline tier afterwards.
Delete them permanently
In Settings, Delete them permanently applies to a document type that has been switched off. It removes Forage's copy of the text, its search entries, and its record that those documents were examined. A reason is required and is recorded.
The documents in SharePoint and in the archive are untouched.
Retention rules cannot be saved yet
Retention is not built. The Retention Rules page says so rather than pretending otherwise.
Privacy and isolation
- No external AI service. Forage sends no document content to any external AI service.
- AI in Forage today. Content classification uses no AI model. Scanned pages are read by optical character recognition models that run inside the deployment.
- Text stays in the deployment. Forage keeps the text it reads, and its search index, inside your own deployment.
- One deployment per customer. Each customer has its own Forage deployment and its own index. There is no shared index, and no path for one customer's search to reach another customer's content.
What the disposal half is designed to do
The following is the design of the half in development. None of it is available today, and none of it is being tested.
- Nothing is deleted automatically. Every disposal passes through a person.
- When the basis for disposal is uncertain, the document is kept. Keeping too much costs storage. Destroying wrongly cannot be undone.
- Legal hold always wins.
- If nobody reviews, nothing happens. The absence of a decision is not a decision to destroy.
- Each document is checked again immediately before it is destroyed.
- A rule is dry run before it goes live.
- Every destruction produces a certificate: what, when, under which rule, and approved by whom.
See limitations for the full list of what is not yet available.
Questions about how a deployment is secured go to SmiKar (sales@smikar.com).