Sovereignty · 2026-09-15 · 1:36

PII redaction that never leaves the device

Name: PII redaction that never leaves the device
Uploaded: 2026-09-15
Duration: 1 min 36 s
Description: a genuinely useful privacy-by-design building block for teams that must keep data on their own infrastructure. Test it on your own formats first.

Desert Ant Labs' Redact strips names, addresses, IBANs and IDs from text on-device, across 27 European languages, Greek included. About 25 MB.

In favour

Runs offline (Linux, browser, phone); text is masked before anything is sent anywhere.
In our own Greek test it caught name, address, phone, tax number and IBAN correctly.

Worth watching

Source-available licence, not open source; a commercial licence is needed at scale.
Per-language coverage varies; in our test it missed a Greek ID-card number.

Our takea genuinely useful privacy-by-design building block for teams that must keep data on their own infrastructure. Test it on your own formats first.

Source: Desert Ant Labs — Redact (Hugging Face)

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Transcript

Names, addresses, bank account numbers. What if they could be taken out of a text before it ever leaves your device? A small redaction model does exactly that. It strips names, addresses, IBANs and ID numbers from text, right on the device, across 27 European languages, Greek included. That is the whole idea. The personal data is masked where it already sits, and never has to leave. The model itself is about 25 MB. First, it runs offline. On Linux, in a browser, even on a phone. The text is masked on the device, before anything is sent anywhere. Second, it held up in our own Greek test. It caught the name, the address, the phone number, the tax number and the IBAN, all of them correctly. Two things to keep straight. The licence is source-available, which is not the same as open source. And at scale, you need a commercial licence. And coverage varies from language to language. It is not equally strong everywhere. In our own Greek test, it missed a Greek ID-card number. So, our take. This is a genuinely useful building block for privacy by design, for teams that must keep data on their own infrastructure. Test it on your own formats first.