Gemini API in India

Confidentiality duties bind independently of data protection law

Required checks

• Review the confidentiality clauses in the contracts covering the material going into the system.
• Identify any contract requiring notice or consent before a subcontractor processes the material.
• Decide whether the deployment needs a confidentiality carve-out negotiated into new contracts.

Vendor questions

• Will the vendor accept a confidentiality undertaking beyond its standard terms?
• Which staff at the vendor can access customer content, under what controls?

Technical controls

• Segregate the most sensitive corpora into an index that the general assistant cannot reach.

Human review required — take this to your counsel

What ends up in a prompt, and where it goes next

Required checks

• Write down which categories of information may be entered into a prompt, and tell people.
• Establish what the system prompt contains and whether disclosing it would matter.
• Establish which shadow tools staff are already using; the policy has to name the permitted ones.

Vendor questions

• Are prompts and completions retained, for how long, and can retention be set to zero?
• Are prompts used for abuse monitoring, and if so who can read them and for how long?

Technical controls

• Redact or block high-risk patterns before the prompt leaves the application.
• Keep prompt and completion logs out of general-purpose observability tools.
• Set an explicit retention period on prompt logs and enforce it.

The acceptable-use policy may exclude your use case

Required checks

• Read the acceptable-use policy against your actual use case, not against a summary of it.
• Where a carve-out applies, decide whether human review brings the use back inside the policy.
• Set a reminder to re-read the policy — it changes without notice to you.

Vendor questions

• Does your acceptable-use policy permit this use case, and will you confirm that in writing?
• How are we notified when the acceptable-use policy changes?

Human review required — take this to your counsel

Being able to reconstruct a decision months later

Required checks

• Decide what is recorded per interaction: model and version, prompt template version, retrieved document ids, output, reviewer and outcome.
• Set how long those records are kept, balanced against the retention duties that also apply to them.

Vendor questions

• Does the vendor pin model versions, and how much notice is given before a model is retired or changed?

Technical controls

• Version prompt templates in source control and log the version used.
• Log the model identifier and version returned by the provider, not the one you requested.

Vendor documentation has not been verified

Required checks

• Obtain the current versions of the processing agreement, subprocessor list, security page and any regional-processing commitment.
• Check that what the sales conversation promised also appears in the contract.

Vendor questions

• Where is your data processing agreement published, and which version applies to us?
• Where is your subprocessor list, and how much notice do we get before it changes?
• Do you train on customer content by default, and where is that stated contractually?
• In which country or region is inference performed, and where are logs retained?

We were not told whether a person reviews the output

Required checks

• Name the role that reviews the output and what they see when they do.
• Decide what evidence is retained about each review, so the practice can be shown to exist.
• Set a threshold below which the system must not act without review.

Vendor questions

• Does the product expose the retrieved context and the confidence behind a suggestion, or only the answer?

Technical controls

• Show the reviewer the retrieved sources next to the suggestion, not the suggestion alone.
• Record the reviewer’s decision, including overrides, as part of the audit trail.

Human review required — take this to your counsel

An AI deployment creates new copies of the data

Required checks

• List every store the deployment creates and add each to the retention schedule.
• Establish how a deletion request propagates to the index, the caches and the logs.
• Establish how long backups keep material that has been deleted from the live system.

Vendor questions

• What does the vendor retain, where, and for how long after we delete our copy?

Technical controls

• Store the source document id with every embedding so deletion can cascade.
• Set time-to-live on prompt and completion logs rather than relying on manual cleanup.

The vendor’s terms may not permit the deployment you are planning

Required checks

• Identify which contract actually governs — self-serve terms, an order form, or a negotiated agreement.
• Check restrictions on seat sharing and on service accounts, which a shared internal assistant can breach without anyone noticing.
• Check whether the terms allow the categories of data you intend to send.

Vendor questions

• Which agreement governs our use, and can we have the current version in writing?
• Are there restrictions on the data categories or the industries we may use the service for?

The six-hour incident clock and in-India log residency apply today

Required checks

• Confirm where the AI platform’s logs are stored, because logs held only outside India do not satisfy the residency requirement.
• Rehearse a six-hour report: the clock starts on noticing, not on confirming.
• Check the incident list against what an AI deployment can actually suffer, including data exposure through the model.

Vendor questions

• Can logs relating to Indian operations be retained inside India for 180 days, and can you evidence that?
• What is your incident notification time to us, and does it fit inside a six-hour regulatory clock?

Technical controls

• Mirror the relevant logs into an Indian store, and confirm the mirror is complete rather than sampled.

Human review required — take this to your counsel

India uses a negative list, so there is no adequacy decision to look for

Required checks

• Do not build a transfer-mechanism workstream on the assumption that India works like the European Union.
• Check instead whether any sectoral localisation rule reaches the data — that is where the real constraint is.
• Watch for a restricted-country notification rather than assuming the position is permanent.