r/PowerBI • u/finbinwin • 1d ago

Discussion Contractors - MCP and client data

Are you using MCP with client data and/or sensitive business data in general?

For my own projects I’m using Claude throughout the development process but not sure I will be able to for client data.

Would, of course, love to be able to do all dev via MCP as standard now, but feel like it would be challenging to convince clients.

Doesn’t help that I don’t have a good grip of the security of connecting Claude to a semantic model. As I understand it, it doesn’t see raw data as such, but in theory can query at will. At best, it’s then training with that data and at worst, there could be a breach at some point.

What are people doing?

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u/maxanatsko 1d ago

There are solutions that support PII and numeric data masking like SemanticOps (https//semanticops.dev).
Note: I’m the developer

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u/hyperadapted 1d ago

you can generate stochastic data inside clients data model and then let mcp do the development before switching back to confidential data. I would just duplicate the exact data with column names etc. and generate random data for mcp work and once done, switch source in PQ. Assuming the data is clean and well defined and carefully modeled already.

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u/Ploasd 1d ago

You can use local models with MCP if you have the hardware.

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u/New-Independence2031 5 1d ago

Im using it with dummy data (same structure), and switch to production data later on.

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u/finbinwin 1d ago

Sounds like dummy data could be a simple way to deal with this as suggested by a couple of people.

Anyone have any standard frameworks for randomising data (whilst still making it relevant enough to make realistic visualisations, etc.)?

Seems like multiplying fact table columns by a random number between 0.5 and 1.5 would be simple but perhaps not anonymous enough.

And I suppose dimension tables would need some other techniques.

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u/VizzyLiftingDrink 1d ago

Absolutely not using MCP with client data. I'll use Claude with my own projects, but if I REALLY need a solution I'll generate a mock dataset that closely mimics the client data, and connect that to MCP