--- title: "Pass-through data" summary: "Pass-through data is material a system may return to the caller who asked for it but may never retain — the tier where the difference between showing and storing is contractual rather than stylistic." canonical_url: https://entitybind.com/glossary/pass-through-data last_updated: 2026-10-15 copy: full --- # Pass-through data > Pass-through data is material a system may return to the caller who asked for it but may never retain — the tier where the difference between showing and storing is contractual rather than stylistic. Canonical page: https://entitybind.com/glossary/pass-through-data Last updated: 2026-10-15 Glossary · Data, licence and time ## How to read this The definition as the field writes it comes first, weaknesses and all. What Entity Bind does about it comes last, in its own paragraph, so you can take one without the other. [Filed under data, licence and time](https://entitybind.com/glossary#data). By [James Rooney](https://entitybind.com/about), founder of Entity Bind · Last revised 15 October 2026 ## What pass-through data means Pass-through data is material a system may show and may not keep. Many data sources permit a query result to be shown to the caller who asked and prohibit warehousing it: display and storage are separate rights. The distinction is legally sharp and technically slippery, because the default behaviour of every pipeline is to persist what it fetched — into a cache, a log, an audit trail, a golden record, or a serialised copy of a decision. Handling it correctly means treating persistence as the exception. The fact is marked at ingestion, kept in memory for the response, excluded from assembly, stripped from anything serialised, and refused by the store if it somehow reaches it. Each of those layers catches a different mistake, and a system with only one of them is one refactor away from a breach. The commercial consequence is concrete. Pass-through material is in the response and is not in the export, not in the golden record and not resellable. A vendor whose export contains everything the API returned has either licensed all of it or has not thought about this. Entity Bind enforces it in three places with one rule. Saving an entity that carries a pass-through fact raises before any write happens; the serialised copy of a decision has that material stripped while the in-memory object keeps it, because it may be returned and must not be stored; and survivorship drops pass-through facts before a golden record is assembled at all. ## Where this shows up in Entity Bind Three pages where this term stops being vocabulary and starts changing an answer, a payload or a price. - [Register coverage](https://entitybind.com/coverage): The registers the resolver reads, the licence each one publishes under, and how often a live entity's name is unique once it is tidied to a common form. - [Security and tenancy](https://entitybind.com/trust): Credentials, tenancy, retention and what is not held, answered before the questionnaire arrives. - [Pricing and the credit rule](https://entitybind.com/pricing): What a decision costs, what a deep attempt costs, and the three things that cost nothing at all. The fastest way past a definition is a file: which of your rows are the same company, which of your existing matches we would not have made, and what we could not decide. [Start free →](https://app.entitybind.com/app?signup=1) ## The terms next to this one Each with its own sentence, because the next question is usually about the word beside this one. - [Licence tier](https://entitybind.com/glossary/licence-tier): A licence tier is the classification carried by an individual fact that determines what may lawfully be done with it — stored, redistributed, resold, or only shown once to the caller who asked. - [Golden record](https://entitybind.com/glossary/golden-record): A golden record is the single assembled view of an entity built by choosing one value per field from the records attached to it, ideally with the provenance of each choice carried alongside it. - [Survivorship](https://entitybind.com/glossary/survivorship): Survivorship is the set of rules that picks which value wins, field by field, when the records in a cluster disagree. - [Provenance](https://entitybind.com/glossary/provenance): Provenance is the record of where each individual value came from — which source, retrieved when, effective when — attached to the value itself rather than to the dataset as a whole. - [Citation](https://entitybind.com/glossary/citation): A citation is a resolvable pointer to the specific source document or record that supports a claim, as distinct from a source name, which is only an attribution. ## The other 6 terms on this shelf Facts have owners and dates. What may be stored, what may only be passed through, and what a date on a fact actually asserts. - [Licence tier](https://entitybind.com/glossary/licence-tier) - [Temporal facts](https://entitybind.com/glossary/temporal-facts) - [First seen](https://entitybind.com/glossary/first-seen) - [Last confirmed](https://entitybind.com/glossary/last-confirmed) - [PSC (person with significant control)](https://entitybind.com/glossary/psc) - [Beneficial ownership](https://entitybind.com/glossary/beneficial-ownership) Previous, alphabetically: [Pairwise metrics](https://entitybind.com/glossary/pairwise-metrics) · Next, alphabetically: [Precision](https://entitybind.com/glossary/precision) ## Evidence basis Internal fixtures only. The historical 2026-08-29 per-tier recording covers 317 GB companies with identifier-rich arrivals seeding the catalogue first; the context tier includes country and registered-town prose. Its legacy replay has no full-prompt-verified calls and cannot certify current calibration. The September 5 CI reports cover 1,176 labelled pairs and 705 records over 250 companies using offline stubs. These are not independent customer holdouts or live production validation; the 99% minimum-input product target remains unmet. Scope is company and organisation identity only — not people, vessels, bank-account ownership, sanctions or emissions. Results may not be used for eligibility decisions about individuals, including employment, credit and tenancy. ## Start with your own company records. Create your workspace, verify your email and run your first company file. The Free plan needs no card. Create API keys in your workspace when you need an integration. [Start free](https://app.entitybind.com/app?signup=1) · [All 64 terms](https://entitybind.com/glossary) 300 credits. No card. For a guided review of your file, explore [the Merge Safety Sprint](https://entitybind.com/audit-pack). --- Entity Bind resolves companies and organisations only. It does not resolve people, vessels, bank-account ownership, sanctions exposure, emissions or geolocation, and its results may not be used for eligibility decisions about individuals, including employment, credit and tenancy. This is the Markdown copy of https://entitybind.com/glossary/pass-through-data, assembled from the same data the page renders and carrying every sentence, table row, figure and question the page's main content carries. The HTML page is canonical; it adds the layout, the navigation and the interactive parts (the ask panel, the forms), which a copy can name but not run. Every page on the site, with a line on each: https://entitybind.com/llms.txt.