CVE-2025-0282: Ivanti Connect Secure and the Edge-Device Problem
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February 12, 2025Late January 2025 saw DeepSeek’s low-cost reasoning models dominate the technology news cycle and rattle markets. Beyond the economics, the moment raised a practical question for Canadian businesses: when a powerful new AI service appears overnight, who inside your organization is already pasting company data into it?
The governance gap
New AI tools are adopted faster than policies can keep up. Employees experiment because the tools genuinely help, but free consumer services may retain prompts, use them for training, and store data in jurisdictions with different privacy regimes. For a service hosted outside Canada, that can create obligations and exposures under PIPEDA and sector rules that leadership never signed off on.
Questions worth asking before adoption
- Where does the data go, and under whose laws is it stored and processed?
- Is input used for training, and can that be disabled?
- What is retained, for how long, and can it be deleted on request?
- Who is accountable internally for approving the tool?
A pragmatic response
Banning AI outright tends to push usage underground, creating shadow AI you cannot see. A better approach is to channel it. Publish a short, readable acceptable-use guideline that names what data must never be entered, such as client records, credentials, source code, and regulated personal information. Offer a sanctioned option so staff have a safe default. On the technical side, data loss prevention and egress monitoring can flag bulk uploads to AI endpoints.
Takeaway
Assume employees will try every promising AI tool the week it launches. Get ahead of it with clear data rules, a sanctioned safe option, and basic egress visibility, so innovation does not quietly become a privacy incident.