Data residency, latency, and why it changes how quickly your documents get processed — and who can legally see them.
Every time you upload a PDF to a cloud service, two things happen: bytes travel across the internet to a data centre, and a legal jurisdiction attaches itself to your document. Both matter more than most users realise.
Latency: the physics side
A round trip from Johannesburg to a US-east data centre is about 230 milliseconds. To a European data centre it's around 150. That adds up fast when a summarisation job makes dozens of calls. Processing regionally can cut the wall-clock time by more than half on the same model.
Jurisdiction: the legal side
Where your document is processed determines whose laws apply to it. For EU users that means GDPR. For South African users it means POPIA. If your provider only processes in one region, you inherit whatever laws that region has — often without noticing.
What PDFalot does about it
We run processing in North America and Europe, and we route your document to the region closest to you unless you tell us otherwise. Documents are processed in memory and are not retained after your session ends. You can read the specifics in our Privacy Notice.
What to ask any provider
- Where physically is my document processed?
- How long is it retained, and can I force immediate deletion?
- Is it used to train models?
- Which sub-processors touch it?
Try it on your own PDF
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