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Find and redact personal information in documents — entirely on your device.

Load a PDF, markdown, or text file, detect PII with built-in rules or local ONNX models, review every match, and export a safely redacted copy. No document content ever leaves your machine.

Example · Features · Detection Backends · Setup · Development · Roadmap

PII GUI is a Tauri 2 desktop app (React 19 + TypeScript frontend, Rust backend) for local-first PII detection and redaction. Detection runs on-device with regex rules or quantized ONNX models; the only network access is the optional one-time model download.

Example

PII GUI supports two local workflows.

Text PII Redact PDF

Text -> PII: detect names, emails, phone numbers, URLs, dates, IDs, and secrets before exporting a redacted copy. PII -> Text: restore reviewed placeholders back into readable text when you need a reversible local review workflow. Burn approved redactions into exported PDFs so hidden text is not recoverable from the output file.

Features

Local inference only — PII detection runs entirely on-device. The only network access is the optional one-time model download from Hugging Face.

PDF, Markdown, and plain-text input — PDFs are parsed with pdf.js, preserving per-character positions so detections are highlighted directly on the rendered page.

Custom rules — add your own regex or exact-match filters on top of any backend.

Review before redacting — toggle individual matches on or off in the workbench before export.

True PDF redaction — exported PDFs burn opaque rectangles into the rendered pages with pdf-lib, so redacted text is not recoverable from the output file.

Task history and persistence — tabs, custom rules, and filter results survive restarts via a local SQLite database and on-disk result files.

Long-document support — input is split into token-bounded, page-aware chunks and processed through a task queue.

Localized UI — English, Korean, and Japanese.

Detection Backends

Backend Best for

Regex (built-in) Instant baseline detection of emails, phones, URLs, dates, account numbers, and secrets

OpenAI Privacy Filter Long English documents and broad privacy-taxonomy detection

BardsAI EU PII European-language text where names, addresses, and ID-like entities matter

Detection taxonomy

Matches are labeled with a fixed privacy taxonomy:

account_number · private_address · private_email · private_person · private_phone · private_url · private_date · secret

Requirements

Node.js 24+

pnpm

Rust and Cargo

Tauri v2 platform prerequisites for your OS

Setup

Download the latest installer for macOS, Windows, or Linux from the Releases page.

On first launch, the onboarding flow lets you pick a default backend. Regex works immediately; the ONNX models are optional downloads (fetched from Hugging Face into the app data directory, and removable at any time from Settings).

Install from source:

cd tauri pnpm install

Local release signing values are optional for development. If you need updater signing locally, copy the environment template and fill in your own key:

cp .env.example .env

How it works

Document (PDF / md / txt) → text extraction (pdf.js, per-character boxes for PDFs) → token-bounded, page-aware chunking → task queue → Rust redact_text command → regex / ONNX inference (ort + tokenizers) → matches + redacted text → review & toggle matches in the UI → export (burned-in PDF redaction or redacted text)

The frontend (React) handles document parsing, chunking, review, and export. The Rust backend (src-tauri/) owns the detection engines, model lifecycle (download / verify / delete), and file I/O — all writes are confined to the Tauri app data directory.

Development

Run from source

cd tauri pnpm install pnpm tauri dev

Build

cd tauri pnpm tauri build

Tests

cd tauri pnpm test:unit # frontend unit tests (vitest) pnpm build # typecheck + frontend build

cd src-tauri cargo test # Rust backend tests

Roadmap

Local regex detection and review workflow

Optional ONNX backend wiring for OpenAI Privacy Filter and BardsAI EU PII

Burned-in PDF redaction export

Local tab, custom-rule, and result persistence

Broader import/export QA for large PDFs and multilingual documents

Accessibility and keyboard-only review pass

Integration with coding agents (Codex, Claude Code, Cursor)

Project structure

tauri/ # the desktop app src/ # React frontend App.tsx # orchestrator: tabs, routing, workbench components/ # PDF preview, shadcn/Radix UI primitives lib/ pdf-document.ts # pdf.js text + char-box extraction pii-text-chunks.ts # token-bounded chunking pii-task-queue.ts # detection task queue redaction-policy.ts # match merge/select/restore logic pdf-redacted-export.ts# burned-in PDF redaction export app-persistence.ts # SQLite + result-file persistence i18n.ts # en / ko / ja UI copy src-tauri/ # Rust backend src/lib.rs # Tauri commands: redact_text, model lifecycle, file I/O src/redact_engine.rs # regex / ONNX / BardsAI detection backends docs/assets/ # README thumbnail and screenshot assets .github/workflows/release.yml # cross-platform release builds

Contributing

Contributions are welcome!

Bug reports & feature requests — open an issue with steps to reproduce or a short description of the use case.

Pull requests — keep changes small and focused. Before submitting, run the checks for the area you touched:

Frontend: pnpm test:unit and pnpm build from tauri/

Rust backend: cargo test from tauri/src-tauri/

Detection quality — false positives/negatives are especially useful to report; include the backend (regex / Privacy Filter / BardsAI) and a minimal, PII-free sample that reproduces the issue.

Benchmarks — keep local benchmark scripts and outputs out of commits; /benchmarks/ is ignored.

License

PII GUI is licensed under the GNU Affero General Public License v3.0.

Acknowledgements

PII GUI builds on several open-source projects and model releases:

pdf.js and pdf-lib for PDF parsing and export.

ONNX Runtime and tokenizers for local model inference.

OpenAI Privacy Filter and BardsAI EU PII for optional local PII detection models.

Verification

Run the smallest check that proves the change, then widen as needed:

cd tauri && pnpm test:unit cd tauri && pnpm build cd tauri/src-tauri && cargo check git diff --check

For packaging, run pnpm tauri build on the target platform before making release claims.

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PII GUI v0.1.2

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Languages

TypeScript 79.6%

Rust 19.5%

Other 0.9%