AI processing in the EU
HouseControl.at uses AI for three things: text improvement when writing reports and notices, automatic translation between the residents' languages, and the initial handling of support requests. All three run via the EU endpoints of Google Cloud.
As of: August 2026
Which services, which endpoint
| Service | Purpose | Endpoint / region |
|---|---|---|
| Google Cloud Vertex AI | Text improvement and support AI | aiplatform.eu.rep.googleapis.com · eu |
| Google Cloud Translation v3 | Translation and language detection | translate-eu.googleapis.com · europe-west1 |
Authentication with these services runs through a service account, not through an API key. That is not a detail: the key-based access to Vertex AI has no region setting and always runs globally — the commitment regarding the processing region would be lost without anyone noticing.
What Google guarantees for this configuration
- Data at rest remains in the selected region or multi-region.
- Processing by the service itself takes place within the selected region. For generative models Google gives this guarantee expressly only for EU and US locations.
- Content is not used to train or fine-tune AI models.
- If abuse is suspected, requests and responses may be stored for up to 90 days — according to Google in the same region.
What is expressly not guaranteed
We write this down because leaving it out is exactly where the statement would become false. Anyone who promises "your data never leaves the EU" promises more than Google guarantees.
- The guarantee governs where processing takes place — not from where access is possible. Google support and technical staff may also access from outside the EU in the event of a fault or maintenance. Only paid add-on packages route support cases to staff within the EU.
- Resource identifiers, attributes and labels do not count as customer data and are not covered by the guarantee. The same applies to the service's operational and billing data.
- Google is a US corporation. A server location in the EU does not change that. Google's strictest sovereignty tier currently excludes generative AI — anyone who needs it would have no way around a self-hosted model.
What we do on top of that
- Without a confirmed AI notice not a single request goes out. This applies to text improvement and translation alike.
- For the support AI the entire case is not transmitted, only expressly approved fields. New fields are blocked until they are individually approved — not the other way round (data minimisation, Art. 5(1)(c) GDPR).
- Support without AI is available at any time. How to get it is stated in the support form, not in the fine print.
- Automatic translation is switched off by default and only becomes active upon explicit selection.
If any of this changes
The information on this page is not maintained by hand but read from the live configuration. Should processing at some point not run via the EU endpoints for technical reasons, the guarantee disappears from this page and from the rest of the site instead of remaining in place and becoming false.
Further documents
You will find the full privacy policy at Privacy, the list of sub-processors in the DPA. For questions about processing, a message to the following address is enough: stephan@landsteiner.info.
