Enterprise Security & Compliance

Security & Compliance for Content Moderation

SOC 2 Type II certified, GDPR compliant, end-to-end encrypted infrastructure with TLS 1.3 and AES-256. Flexible data residency across US, EU, and APAC regions with zero-storage processing options for the most stringent security requirements.

SOC 2 Type II
Certified Infrastructure
100%
GDPR Compliant
AES-256
Encryption at Rest
3 Regions
Data Residency Options

Comprehensive Security Framework

From end-to-end encryption and regulatory compliance to audit logging and penetration testing, our security architecture protects every layer of your content moderation pipeline.

SOC 2 Type II Certified

Independently audited controls across security, availability, processing integrity, confidentiality, and privacy trust service criteria with continuous monitoring and annual recertification cycles validated by third-party assessors.

End-to-End Encryption

All data encrypted in transit using TLS 1.3 with perfect forward secrecy and at rest using AES-256 with hardware security module key management, customer-managed keys, and automatic rotation policies.

Global Data Residency

Process and store content moderation data within US, EU, or APAC geographic boundaries to meet data sovereignty requirements with guaranteed data isolation and region-locked processing.

Regulatory Compliance

Full compliance with GDPR, EU Digital Services Act, UK Online Safety Act, Australia Online Safety Act, and COPPA with automated data subject rights management and privacy impact assessments.

Access Control & API Security

Role-based access control, scoped API key management with automatic rotation, IP allow-listing, webhook request signing with HMAC-SHA256, and OAuth 2.0 integration for enterprise identity providers.

Audit Logging & Monitoring

Tamper-proof audit trails for every API call, moderation decision, and administrative action with real-time SIEM integration, anomaly detection, and automated compliance reporting dashboards.

Military-Grade Data Encryption at Every Layer

Every byte of content submitted to our moderation API is protected by multiple encryption layers from the moment it leaves your infrastructure until it is permanently purged from ours. Our encryption architecture eliminates single points of failure and ensures data remains unreadable even in worst-case breach scenarios.

  • TLS 1.3 with perfect forward secrecy for all API transport encryption and webhook deliveries
  • AES-256-GCM encryption at rest with HSM-backed key management and automated 90-day rotation
  • Customer-managed encryption keys (CMEK) for organizations requiring direct control over key material
  • Zero-knowledge processing option where content is analyzed in encrypted form using secure enclaves
  • Certificate pinning support and mutual TLS authentication for high-security integrations

Global Compliance Framework for Every Jurisdiction

Our compliance infrastructure is designed to keep pace with the rapidly evolving global regulatory landscape. From the foundational requirements of GDPR to the newest mandates of the EU Digital Services Act and UK Online Safety Act, we maintain active compliance programs validated through continuous monitoring and regular independent audits.

  • GDPR compliance with automated data subject access requests, right to erasure, and data portability
  • EU Digital Services Act systemic risk assessment and transparency reporting capabilities
  • UK Online Safety Act duty of care compliance with age-appropriate content classification
  • Australia Online Safety Act basic online safety expectations adherence and reporting
  • COPPA compliance with verifiable parental consent workflows and child data protections

Defense-in-Depth Access Management

Securing API access requires layered controls that authenticate, authorize, and audit every interaction. Our access management framework combines role-based permissions, cryptographic API key management, network-level restrictions, and request-level verification to ensure that only legitimate traffic reaches your moderation pipelines.

  • Role-based access control with granular permissions for admin, analyst, developer, and auditor roles
  • Scoped API keys with per-key rate limits, expiration dates, and automatic rotation schedules
  • IP allow-listing and CIDR range restrictions to limit API access to known infrastructure
  • Webhook signing with HMAC-SHA256 so your systems can verify every callback originated from our platform
  • OAuth 2.0 and SAML 2.0 SSO integration with enterprise identity providers and MFA enforcement

Security by the Numbers

Our security posture is measured, monitored, and continuously improved through quantitative metrics and independent validation.

0
Data Breaches Since Inception
99.99%
Security Monitoring Uptime
<15min
Incident Response Time
4x/yr
Penetration Testing Cycles

SOC 2 Type II Certification and Continuous Assurance

Our SOC 2 Type II certification represents the gold standard in demonstrating operational security maturity for cloud-hosted services. Unlike Type I attestations that evaluate control design at a single point in time, Type II audits examine the operating effectiveness of our security controls over a sustained observation period of at least six months. This extended evaluation window provides customers with robust assurance that our security policies, procedures, and technical controls function consistently and effectively under real-world operating conditions rather than only performing well during a snapshot audit.

The audit scope encompasses all five trust service criteria defined by the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants: security, availability, processing integrity, confidentiality, and privacy. For content moderation services, processing integrity is particularly critical because customers rely on the accuracy and completeness of moderation decisions that affect their user communities. Our SOC 2 controls verify that content submitted for analysis is processed completely and accurately, that moderation verdicts are delivered without tampering, and that the underlying machine learning models operate on validated, uncompromised input data. Independent auditors review evidence spanning access control logs, change management records, incident response activities, encryption key rotation histories, and infrastructure monitoring data.

Continuous compliance monitoring extends the value of our SOC 2 certification beyond the formal audit cycle. Automated control testing systems execute thousands of compliance checks daily, verifying that firewall rules remain correctly configured, that encryption keys have been rotated on schedule, that terminated employee accounts have been deprovisioned within the required window, and that backup processes complete successfully. These automated checks generate a compliance posture score that our security operations team monitors in real time, enabling immediate remediation of any control deviations before they can accumulate into material compliance gaps. Quarterly management reviews evaluate trends in compliance posture scores, audit findings, security incidents, and risk assessments to drive continuous improvement in our security program.

End-to-End Encryption Architecture

Transport Layer Security

All network communication between customer systems and our content moderation API is protected by TLS 1.3, the latest and most secure version of the Transport Layer Security protocol. TLS 1.3 eliminates legacy cipher suites that were susceptible to downgrade attacks, reduces the handshake to a single round trip for faster connection establishment, and mandates perfect forward secrecy so that compromise of long-term server keys cannot be used to decrypt previously recorded traffic. Our TLS configuration enforces a strict cipher suite policy that permits only AEAD algorithms including AES-256-GCM and ChaCha20-Poly1305, and our edge infrastructure supports certificate pinning for customers who wish to bind their client applications to our specific TLS certificates.

Webhook deliveries from our platform to customer endpoints are also encrypted with TLS 1.3 and additionally signed using HMAC-SHA256 with a per-customer webhook secret. This dual-layer approach ensures that webhook payloads cannot be read in transit and that receiving systems can cryptographically verify that each webhook originated from our platform and has not been tampered with during delivery. For customers operating in environments that require mutual TLS authentication, we support mTLS configurations where both sides of the connection present and validate X.509 certificates, ensuring bidirectional identity verification before any data is exchanged.

Encryption at Rest

All persistent data within our infrastructure is encrypted at rest using AES-256-GCM, providing both confidentiality and integrity protection. Encryption keys are managed by hardware security modules that are FIPS 140-2 Level 3 validated, ensuring that key material never exists in plaintext outside the tamper-resistant boundary of the HSM. Key rotation occurs automatically on a 90-day cycle, and each rotation generates new key material while maintaining the ability to decrypt data encrypted under previous key versions until that data is either re-encrypted or permanently purged. Customers who require direct control over their encryption keys can provision their own key material through our customer-managed encryption key program, allowing them to revoke access to their data at any time by disabling their keys.

Zero-Storage Processing

For organizations with the most stringent data protection requirements, our zero-storage processing option ensures that submitted content is analyzed entirely in volatile memory and is never written to persistent storage. Content payloads are decrypted within a secure enclave, processed by our moderation models, and the resulting moderation verdict is returned to the customer in a single synchronous API call. Once the response is delivered, all traces of the original content are purged from enclave memory. This processing mode eliminates data retention risk entirely and is ideal for organizations processing highly sensitive content such as private communications, medical records, or financial documents that require content moderation but cannot tolerate any third-party data persistence.

Data Residency and Sovereignty

Our multi-region infrastructure provides guaranteed data residency in three geographic zones: United States, European Union, and Asia-Pacific. When a customer selects a data residency region during account provisioning, all content submitted to our API is received, processed, and stored exclusively within that region. Cross-region data movement is architecturally prohibited through network segmentation, region-locked service endpoints, and automated compliance validation that continuously verifies data locality constraints. Each regional deployment operates as a fully independent processing cluster with its own compute infrastructure, storage systems, encryption key hierarchies, and audit logging pipelines, ensuring that data sovereignty is maintained through physical and logical isolation rather than relying solely on policy controls.

European Union data residency is particularly important for organizations subject to GDPR and emerging EU data sovereignty initiatives. Our EU deployment is hosted entirely within EU member state data centers and is operated by personnel who have been vetted according to EU employment and data protection standards. Standard Contractual Clauses and supplementary technical measures are available for any ancillary data flows that may arise, such as aggregated, anonymized telemetry used for global model improvement, though customers can opt out of such flows entirely. For customers who need to serve global user bases while maintaining EU data residency, our architecture supports receiving API requests from any geographic origin while guaranteeing that all processing and storage occurs within EU boundaries.

The Asia-Pacific data residency option supports organizations operating under data localization requirements in jurisdictions including Australia, Singapore, Japan, and South Korea. This region provides the same security controls, encryption standards, and compliance certifications as our US and EU deployments, with infrastructure located in APAC data centers that meet local regulatory requirements. Organizations can route different content streams to different regions based on the geographic origin of the content or the residency of the user who generated it, enabling fine-grained compliance with jurisdiction-specific data localization mandates.

GDPR Compliance and Privacy-by-Design

Our GDPR compliance framework implements privacy-by-design principles at every layer of the content moderation architecture. Data minimization is enforced by accepting only the content fields required for moderation analysis and rejecting payloads that include unnecessary personal identifiers. Purpose limitation is architecturally enforced by restricting the use of submitted content to moderation analysis and preventing its use for model training unless the customer has provided explicit, documented consent. Storage limitation is managed through configurable data retention policies that range from immediate deletion upon response delivery to maximum retention periods that comply with regulatory requirements, with automated purging that executes without manual intervention.

Data subject rights management is built into our platform as a first-class capability rather than an afterthought. When a data subject exercises their right of access under GDPR Article 15, our systems can generate a comprehensive export of all data associated with that individual across all moderation interactions. Right to erasure requests under Article 17 trigger a cascading deletion workflow that removes the subject's data from active databases, backup systems, audit logs, and any derived datasets within the timeframes mandated by GDPR. Right to data portability under Article 20 is supported through structured data export in machine-readable JSON format. All data subject rights operations are logged in tamper-proof audit trails that provide evidence of compliance for supervisory authority inquiries.

Privacy impact assessments are conducted whenever new moderation features are developed or existing processing activities are materially changed. These assessments evaluate the necessity and proportionality of the processing, identify privacy risks to data subjects, and document the technical and organizational measures implemented to mitigate those risks. Our Data Protection Officer oversees the PIA process and serves as the point of contact for supervisory authorities and data subjects. We maintain a comprehensive Record of Processing Activities as required by GDPR Article 30, which documents the purposes, categories of data, recipients, international transfers, retention periods, and technical safeguards for every processing activity within our content moderation infrastructure.

EU Digital Services Act and UK Online Safety Act Compliance

Digital Services Act Obligations

The EU Digital Services Act imposes significant new obligations on platforms regarding content moderation transparency, systemic risk assessment, and regulatory reporting. Our infrastructure supports DSA compliance through automated transparency reporting that generates the detailed statistics on content moderation volumes, removal rates, appeal outcomes, and average response times required by Article 15. For platforms designated as Very Large Online Platforms under the DSA, our systemic risk assessment module provides the analytical framework needed to identify and mitigate risks related to illegal content dissemination, fundamental rights impacts, and manipulation of platform services. Audit-ready data exports support the independent auditing requirements that VLOPs face under Article 37.

The DSA's requirements around statement of reasons for content moderation decisions are addressed through our detailed verdict metadata system. Every moderation decision includes a structured explanation identifying the specific policy violated, the content elements that triggered the violation, the applicable legal basis, and the available remedies including the appeals process. This metadata is generated automatically alongside every moderation verdict and is stored in an immutable audit trail that can be presented to Digital Services Coordinators or courts in the event of a dispute. Our platform also supports the trusted flagger mechanism defined in Article 22, providing priority processing queues and dedicated response workflows for designated trusted flaggers.

UK Online Safety Act Requirements

The UK Online Safety Act establishes a duty of care framework that requires platforms to take proactive measures to protect users from illegal content and, for platforms likely to be accessed by children, from content that is harmful to children. Our compliance module maps moderation categories to the priority illegal content types defined in the Act, including terrorism, child sexual exploitation, fraud, and hate crime, and automatically generates the risk assessments required by Ofcom's codes of practice. Age-appropriate content classification capabilities enable platforms to implement the differential content access requirements that the Act mandates for services likely to be accessed by users under eighteen, with configurable age-tier thresholds and content category restrictions.

Australia Online Safety Act and COPPA

Compliance with the Australia Online Safety Act is supported through our basic online safety expectations mapping, which aligns moderation policies with the mandatory expectations established by the eSafety Commissioner. Our platform facilitates compliance with the Commissioner's removal notices by providing rapid content takedown capabilities and the evidentiary data needed to demonstrate compliance with notice timeframes. COPPA compliance for platforms serving children under thirteen in the United States is addressed through our age-gated processing mode, which enforces verifiable parental consent workflows, restricts the collection of personal information from children, and provides parents with the ability to review and delete their child's data. The age-gated mode automatically applies enhanced privacy protections including stricter data minimization, shortened retention periods, and additional safeguards against behavioral profiling.

Data Retention Policies and Lifecycle Management

Our data retention framework provides granular control over the lifecycle of content moderation data, recognizing that different organizations face different regulatory requirements and risk tolerances. Retention policies are configurable at the account level with four preset tiers: zero retention, where content is purged from memory immediately after the API response is delivered; short-term retention of up to seven days, which supports dispute resolution and quality assurance workflows; standard retention of up to thirty days, which provides adequate audit trail depth for most compliance requirements; and extended retention of up to ninety days for organizations that face regulatory mandates requiring longer preservation of moderation records.

Regardless of the selected retention tier, our automated purging system executes deletion workflows without manual intervention. Purging operations are cryptographically verified, meaning that the deletion of encrypted data is accomplished by destroying the encryption keys that protect it, rendering the data permanently unrecoverable even if the underlying storage media is compromised. Purging logs are maintained in a separate, tamper-proof audit system to provide evidence that data was deleted within the required timeframe. For organizations that require forensic-grade data destruction assurance, we provide certificates of destruction upon request that document the specific data objects purged, the timestamps of purging operations, and the cryptographic verification of key destruction.

Role-Based Access Control and API Key Management

Our role-based access control system implements the principle of least privilege by defining four hierarchical roles with progressively expanding permissions. The Auditor role provides read-only access to moderation verdicts, audit logs, and compliance reports, supporting oversight functions without the ability to modify system behavior. The Analyst role extends auditor permissions with the ability to review flagged content, make manual moderation decisions, and manage appeal workflows. The Developer role provides API key management, webhook configuration, and integration settings needed to build and maintain moderation pipelines. The Administrator role encompasses full platform access including user management, policy configuration, billing, and security settings.

API key management enforces security best practices through scoped permissions, automatic expiration, and rotation scheduling. Each API key is bound to a specific set of allowed operations and content types, preventing a key intended for text moderation from being used to access image analysis endpoints. Keys can be further restricted by IP allow-list, requiring that API requests originate from pre-approved IP addresses or CIDR ranges. Automatic key rotation generates new key material on a configurable schedule, with a grace period during which both the old and new keys are accepted to allow seamless rotation without service interruption. Key usage analytics track request volumes, error rates, and geographic origins for each key, enabling security teams to detect anomalous usage patterns that may indicate key compromise.

Penetration Testing and Vulnerability Management

Our vulnerability management program combines automated scanning, manual penetration testing, and responsible disclosure to maintain a continuously hardened security posture. Automated vulnerability scanners assess our infrastructure, application code, container images, and third-party dependencies on a daily basis, with critical and high-severity findings triaged within four hours and remediated within twenty-four hours. Static application security testing is integrated into our continuous integration pipeline, blocking the deployment of code that introduces known vulnerability patterns. Dynamic application security testing exercises our running API endpoints with attack payloads to identify vulnerabilities that emerge only at runtime.

Quarterly penetration testing engagements conducted by independent, CREST-certified security firms simulate real-world attack scenarios against our externally facing API surfaces, internal network infrastructure, and cloud platform configurations. These engagements follow a grey-box methodology where testers receive API documentation and limited credentials to maximize the depth of testing within realistic time constraints. Findings are classified according to CVSS 3.1 severity ratings and remediated according to our SLA commitments: critical findings within 24 hours, high within 72 hours, medium within 14 days, and low within 30 days. Full penetration testing reports are available to enterprise customers under NDA upon request.

Incident Response and Security Operations

Our incident response framework follows the NIST SP 800-61 methodology, providing a structured approach to preparation, detection, containment, eradication, recovery, and post-incident analysis. A dedicated security operations team monitors our infrastructure 24 hours a day, 7 days a week using a Security Information and Event Management platform that correlates events across network, application, and infrastructure layers to detect threats in real time. Machine learning models trained on historical incident data identify anomalous patterns such as unusual API request volumes, authentication failures, data exfiltration indicators, and lateral movement attempts.

When an incident is detected, our response playbooks define clear escalation paths, communication procedures, and technical containment actions for each incident category. Customer-affecting incidents trigger notification procedures within the timeframes defined in our service level agreements, with ongoing status updates provided through our dedicated security incident communication channel. Post-incident reviews produce detailed root cause analyses and corrective action plans that are tracked to completion, and lessons learned are incorporated into updated detection rules, response playbooks, and preventive controls. We maintain a public transparency log of significant security events and their resolutions, demonstrating our commitment to accountability even in challenging circumstances.

Business continuity and disaster recovery capabilities ensure that security monitoring and incident response functions remain operational even during major infrastructure events. Our security operations center operates across two geographically separated sites with automatic failover, and critical security tooling is deployed in an active-active configuration that eliminates single points of failure. Disaster recovery testing is conducted quarterly with full failover exercises that validate our ability to maintain continuous security monitoring during regional infrastructure outages.

Webhook Signing and Request Verification

Every webhook delivery from our platform includes a cryptographic signature that allows receiving systems to verify the authenticity and integrity of the payload. The signature is computed using HMAC-SHA256 with a per-customer webhook secret that is generated during webhook registration and can be rotated at any time through our management console. The signature covers the entire webhook body including the timestamp header, preventing replay attacks where an attacker captures a legitimate webhook and re-sends it at a later time. Our webhook documentation provides reference implementations in all major programming languages that demonstrate correct signature verification, including timestamp validation to reject webhooks that are older than a configurable tolerance window.

For organizations that require additional webhook security, we support mutual TLS for webhook deliveries, where our platform presents its client certificate to the customer's webhook receiver and the receiver presents its server certificate to our platform. This bidirectional certificate validation ensures that webhooks are delivered only to the intended recipient and that the recipient can confirm the webhooks originated from our infrastructure. IP allow-listing for webhook source addresses provides an additional network-layer restriction that limits webhook acceptance to the specific IP ranges used by our delivery infrastructure.

Audit Logging and Compliance Reporting

Our audit logging system captures a comprehensive, tamper-proof record of every meaningful event within the content moderation platform. API requests, moderation decisions, configuration changes, user authentication events, key management operations, and data lifecycle events are logged with microsecond-precision timestamps, actor identification, source IP addresses, and detailed event payloads. Logs are cryptographically signed at the time of creation and stored in append-only, immutable storage that prevents retroactive modification or deletion, ensuring the integrity of audit evidence for regulatory inquiries, legal proceedings, and compliance audits.

Compliance reporting dashboards provide real-time visibility into security posture, regulatory compliance status, and operational metrics. Pre-built report templates generate the specific data outputs required by SOC 2 auditors, GDPR supervisory authorities, DSA Digital Services Coordinators, and internal governance committees. Custom report builders allow security and compliance teams to query audit data across arbitrary time ranges, event categories, and actor filters to investigate specific questions or produce ad hoc evidence packages. All reports can be exported in PDF, CSV, and JSON formats and delivered on automated schedules to designated stakeholders, reducing the manual burden of compliance evidence collection.

Frequently Asked Questions

Everything you need to know about security and compliance for our content moderation API.

What security certifications does your content moderation API hold?
Our content moderation API infrastructure holds SOC 2 Type II certification, which is independently audited on an annual basis by a qualified third-party assessor. The certification covers all five trust service criteria: security, availability, processing integrity, confidentiality, and privacy. Beyond SOC 2, our infrastructure is hosted in data centers that maintain ISO 27001 certification, and our encryption key management uses FIPS 140-2 Level 3 validated hardware security modules. We conduct quarterly penetration testing through CREST-certified independent firms, and we maintain PCI DSS compliance for our payment processing systems. Enterprise customers can request copies of our SOC 2 Type II report and penetration testing executive summaries under NDA to support their own vendor risk assessments and compliance audits.
How do you ensure GDPR compliance for content moderation of EU user data?
GDPR compliance is built into our platform architecture through privacy-by-design principles. Our EU data residency option guarantees that all content submitted from EU-based endpoints is received, processed, and stored exclusively within EU member state data centers with no cross-border data transfers. We enforce data minimization by accepting only the content fields required for moderation analysis, purpose limitation by restricting content use to moderation activities, and storage limitation through configurable retention policies with automated purging. We support all data subject rights including access, rectification, erasure, portability, and objection through automated workflows that execute within GDPR-mandated timeframes. We execute Data Processing Agreements with all customers that document our obligations as a data processor, and our Data Protection Officer is available to respond to supervisory authority inquiries. Privacy impact assessments are conducted for every new processing activity or material change to existing activities.
Can I choose where my content moderation data is stored and processed?
Yes, we offer guaranteed data residency in three geographic regions: United States, European Union, and Asia-Pacific. When you provision your account, you select a primary data residency region, and all content submitted to your API endpoints is received, processed, and stored exclusively within that region. Regional isolation is enforced through network segmentation, region-locked service endpoints, and automated compliance validation that continuously verifies data locality constraints. Each region operates as a fully independent processing cluster with its own compute, storage, encryption keys, and audit logs. You can also configure different content streams to route to different regions based on the geographic origin of the content or the residency of the originating user, enabling fine-grained compliance with jurisdiction-specific data localization requirements. For organizations that require zero data persistence, our zero-storage processing option analyzes content in volatile memory and purges all traces immediately after returning the API response.
What happens to my data after moderation processing is complete?
Data lifecycle management is fully configurable through our retention policy settings. We offer four retention tiers: zero retention, where content is purged from volatile memory immediately after the API response is delivered and is never written to persistent storage; short-term retention of up to seven days for dispute resolution and quality assurance; standard retention of up to thirty days for compliance audit trails; and extended retention of up to ninety days for organizations with regulatory mandates requiring longer preservation. Regardless of the tier selected, our automated purging system executes deletion workflows without manual intervention, and deletion is accomplished through cryptographic key destruction that renders encrypted data permanently unrecoverable. Purging operations are logged in tamper-proof audit trails, and certificates of destruction are available upon request. Metadata about moderation decisions, such as the verdict and policy violated, can be retained independently from the original content, allowing you to maintain decision audit trails without retaining user-generated content.
How do you handle security incidents and breach notifications?
Our incident response framework follows the NIST SP 800-61 methodology with a dedicated 24/7 security operations team monitoring our infrastructure using SIEM technology and machine learning anomaly detection. When a security incident is detected, our response playbooks define clear escalation paths, containment actions, and communication procedures for each incident category. Customer-affecting incidents trigger notification within the timeframes specified in our service level agreements, typically within one hour for critical incidents, with ongoing status updates provided through our dedicated security incident communication channel. For incidents that qualify as personal data breaches under GDPR, we support our customers' 72-hour notification obligations to supervisory authorities by providing detailed incident assessments, affected data scope analysis, and recommended remediation steps. Post-incident reviews produce root cause analyses and corrective action plans that are tracked to completion and incorporated into updated prevention and detection controls. Our public transparency log documents significant security events and their resolutions.

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