Guardrails And Safety medium
An internal assistant searches company documents through a tool that authenticates with a service account that can read the entire shared drive. An intern asks about 'salary bands for my team' and receives content from an HR-restricted spreadsheet. What is the right fix?
- A Run retrieval with the user's delegated credentials or ACLs so the tool returns only documents that user could open.
- B Add a classifier that detects sensitive topics such as compensation and refuses those questions for every employee.
- C List in the system prompt which departments' documents each role may see, and have the model withhold the rest.
- D Remove the HR folders from the index entirely and keep the shared service account for every other document source.
Answer: A. Run retrieval with the user's delegated credentials or ACLs so the tool returns only documents that user could open.
The tool acted as a **confused deputy**, using privileges broader than the user's own. Enforcing the user's ACLs at retrieval ties results to real permissions, at the cost of per-user token handling and lower cache reuse. Removing HR folders (D) is tempting, but it patches one folder while every other restricted folder stays exposed, and HR staff lose a useful tool. A shared service account is fine only when every indexed document is readable by all users.
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