AI engineering glossary · Evals guardrails AI security
What is PII detection?
PII detection (also called personal data detection): Automatically finding personally identifiable information, such as names, phone numbers, email addresses, Aadhaar-style ID numbers or card numbers, in text using patterns, checksums and named-entity models. It lets systems block, mask or route sensitive data before it is stored or sent to a model.
PII detection: an example
A scanner flags '9876543210' in a chat message as a mobile number before the message is logged.
Related terms
More Evals guardrails AI security terms
- PII redaction
- Prompt injection
- Prompt leaking
- promptfoo
- PyRIT
- Red teaming
- Reference-based evaluation
- Reference-free evaluation
Where you learn it
PII detection is part of the AI Engineering Program, which teaches it with notes, a hands-on lab and an exam. The first lesson is free.