Privacy as a purchasable enterprise feature

What it is

Across completely unrelated industries, the meaningful data protections are attached to the paid business tier, and the consumer tier is the one that funds the difference.

Why it matters

The pattern is consistent enough to be structural rather than coincidental. For a nonprofit or small business, the practical read is that the free tier of any tool is the tier that trains on you - and the price difference between tiers IS the privacy difference, whether or not it is marketed that way.

Companies and rows it touches

Anthropic and OpenAI (both checked against their own policy pages), and per their tracker rows Microsoft Copilot, Mistral and Google, exclude commercial tiers from training by default while consumer-tier training is on unless the user opts out. Starlink reserves stronger commitments for Enterprise and Government tiers. Perplexity offers Zero Data Retention on API only (Starlink and Perplexity points per their tracker rows, not re-verified this pass).

Where to look

LLM Providers (all rows); Internet Providers (Starlink)