Presidio

Open source detection and redaction of personal data in text and images.

About Presidio

Presidio is described as a context aware, pluggable and customizable PII de-identification service for text and images. The project is published as an open-source framework for detecting, redacting, masking, and anonymizing sensitive data (PII) across text, images, and structured data. Its stated goals include allowing organizations to preserve privacy in a simpler way by democratizing de-identification technologies.

The page lists options for connecting to external PII detection models. According to the page, usage options range from Python or PySpark workloads through Docker to Kubernetes. The page states that Presidio can help identify sensitive or PII data in unstructured and structured text, but does not guarantee it will find all sensitive information.

Drafted from github.com · not yet confirmed by Microsoft

How it works

Presidio is Microsoft's open source toolkit for finding and removing personal data. The analyzer runs named entity recognition, regex and checksum validators over text to find names, emails, phone numbers, credit card and national ID numbers, addresses and more, with a confidence per hit. The anonymizer then masks, replaces, hashes or redacts them. There's an image module that finds and blacks out PII in images via OCR.

It's a Python library and set of containers you run yourself. Trust and safety teams use it for redacting reports, doxxing detection, and stripping PII before sending content to a third party classifier.