Snowfence vs DLP: data loss prevention for AI tools
Traditional data loss prevention (DLP) looks for sensitive patterns in email, files and web uploads. Snowfence is data loss prevention built for AI tools: it links what an AI tool read to what it tries to send, and it checks what the AI model asked the tool to do. Many companies will run both.
What does traditional DLP do well?
DLP tools find sensitive data, such as card numbers, health records or files marked confidential, in the places data has always left a company: email attachments, uploads to websites, USB drives and cloud storage. They are good at spotting a known pattern in a known channel, and many companies already have one in place.
Why does DLP miss leaks through AI tools?
AI tools break three things DLP relies on.
- The sender isn’t a person any more. A coding agent reads a file, runs a command and sends the result to a model in seconds, without anyone typing anything. DLP built around a person sending an email or uploading a file doesn’t see those steps as one action.
- The data doesn’t look like the original. An agent can summarise, reformat or encode customer data before sending it. A pattern match on the outgoing text can miss it.
- The instruction can come from outside. A prompt injection hidden in a web page can tell an agent to send data out. DLP checks the data, not who asked for it to move.
How Snowfence is different
| Traditional DLP | Snowfence | |
|---|---|---|
| What it checks | Content leaving through known channels | Every prompt, upload and tool call from AI tools, on the network, in the kernel, through MCP and in the browser |
| Links read to send | No: each event is judged alone | Yes: whatever read sensitive data may only send it to places approved for that data |
| Knows what data is | By pattern or a manual tag | By where it came from, such as the CRM. The label follows the data into every file written from it |
| Sees what the AI asked for | No | Yes: a model’s tool call that would upload a file is cancelled before the agent runs it |
| When it finds something | Often removes or masks part of the content | Decides only: allows, asks or blocks, and never changes what was sent |
| New AI tools | Often need a new connector or rule | Checked from the first day, because Snowfence spots an AI tool by what it does: talking to an AI model |
Should you replace DLP with Snowfence?
Not necessarily. DLP covers channels that have nothing to do with AI, such as email to a personal address. Snowfence covers the AI tools DLP wasn’t built for. The two can run side by side: Snowfence only decides, so it never edits data another tool is also checking.
What Snowfence can’t stop
Snowfence stops data leaving through AI tools. It can’t see a phone pointed at a screen, a personal device, or an administrator who switches it off, though switching it off cuts that laptop’s access to company AI services. The security page lists every limit.
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