What is PII redaction?
PII redaction is the process of finding personally identifiable information in text and replacing it with neutral labels before that text is shared with a person, vendor, or AI assistant.
Last updated: August 19, 2026. This page describes the current PII Cleaner product at piicleaner.com.
What counts as PII?
Personally identifiable information is data that can identify, contact, or distinguish a person. Common examples are names, email addresses, phone numbers, home addresses, national identity numbers, payment-card numbers, and account identifiers. In logs and prompts it also includes IP addresses and API keys.
How PII Cleaner redacts text
PII Cleaner is a free, browser-based PII redaction tool. You paste text, choose which data types to detect, and receive a safer copy with stable labels such as [EMAIL_1] and [PHONE_1]. The same value keeps the same label in one session, so the remaining sentence still makes sense.
Detection and replacement run locally in the browser. The original text is not uploaded to PII Cleaner, stored as document contents, or used to train a model.
What the current tool detects
- Names. People identified in common self-introduction patterns. Replaced as
[PERSON_1]. - Email addresses. Personal and business email addresses in text. Replaced as
[EMAIL_1]. - Phone numbers. International and common local phone formats. Replaced as
[PHONE_1]. - Street addresses. Street numbers, names, and common address suffixes. Replaced as
[ADDRESS_1]. - Credit cards. Card-like numbers validated with the Luhn algorithm. Replaced as
[CARD_1]. - IBANs. International bank account number formats. Replaced as
[IBAN_1]. - National IDs. Common structured identity numbers from several countries. Replaced as
[ID_1]. - IP addresses. IPv4 and IPv6 addresses found in logs, tickets, and prompts. Replaced as
[IP_1]. - API keys. Common secret-key formats that should not be shared. Replaced as
[SECRET_1].
When to redact before using an AI assistant
If a prompt, ticket, or note contains customer or employee details, redact it first, review the output, then paste the labelled copy into ChatGPT, Claude, or another assistant. The identifiers stay on your device.
Local redaction versus cloud redaction
A local tool processes text inside the browser. A typical cloud workflow uploads the original text to a remote server. PII Cleaner’s free text cleaner and Pro file tools are local. Pro checkout stores only a license key, email, order ID, and expiry so monthly access can be restored, not the files you clean.
Limits
Automatic detection cannot guarantee that every sensitive value is found. Names are caught mainly in self-introduction patterns. Pro PDF and DOCX output is cleaned text, not a rewritten original file. Review the result before sharing regulated or high-risk information.