Back in 2017, employees at Norwegian oil company Statoil pasted confidential contracts, workforce reduction plans, and dismissal letters into a free translation website. Within days, those documents were searchable on Google. People still cite that incident as the cautionary tale about free machine translation tools, but the bigger story is what’s happened since: shadow AI use has exploded, the cost of exposing intellectual property has climbed, and almost nobody stops to ask what happens to a document’s hidden metadata once it leaves their hands.<\/p>\n