The revised Swiss Federal Act on Data Protection (nFADP; German nDSG, French nLPD) has applied since 1 September 2023 and governs any processing of personal data by private companies and federal bodies. A RAG system that ingests HR files, client dossiers, claims records or correspondence is processing personal data — and the classic failure mode is shipping that data to a foreign cloud AI without a lawful transfer basis.
Where RAG touches the nFADP
- Processing principles (Art. 6). Proportionality and purpose limitation apply to what you ingest: index what users need to query, not everything you can.
- Cross-border disclosure (Art. 16–17). Sending documents or embeddings to a provider abroad is a disclosure. It requires an adequate jurisdiction or safeguards — and US CLOUD Act exposure complicates both. Keeping the whole pipeline in Switzerland removes the question.
- Data security (Art. 8). Encryption at rest and in transit, access control and logging must match the sensitivity of the corpus — for special categories (health, legal files), that bar is high.
- Access & deletion rights (Art. 25 ff.). You must be able to find and delete a person's data — including its chunks, vectors and graph entries.
Technical measures that satisfy the act
| nFADP requirement | Technical answer in SovraRAG |
|---|---|
| Data security (Art. 8) | AES-256-GCM envelope encryption per tenant, applied before storage; TLS in transit; operator-blind design |
| No unlawful cross-border transfer | Inference, vectors, archive and backups exclusively in Swiss datacenters |
| Accountability & auditability | Complete query and audit logs, configurable retention |
| Deletion rights | Document-level deletion cascades to chunks, vectors and graph entries |
| Access limitation | Per-document ACLs enforced at the retrieval layer |
Practical checklist before you deploy RAG
- Classify the corpus: does it contain personal or sensitive personal data?
- Map every subprocessor in the pipeline — including the embedding and reranking APIs, which are easy to overlook.
- Verify where inference runs and under which jurisdiction the operator is incorporated.
- Demand per-tenant encryption and ask who can technically decrypt.
- Test the deletion path end-to-end before go-live.
This article is general information, not legal advice.