Personally identifiable information (PII) filter

Personally identifiable information (PII) refers to any information that can be used to identify a particular individual, such as a name, address, phone number, email address, social security number, driver's license number, passport number, or similar information.

PII detection is used to help prevent PII from being exposed or shared, protecting users from identity theft, financial fraud, or other types of privacy violations.

In the context of large language models (LLMs), PII detection involves analyzing text content in LLM completions. When PII has been identified, it can be flagged for further review, or the output can be blocked. The PII filter scans the output of LLMs to identify and flag known personal information. It's designed to help organizations prevent the generation of content that closely matches sensitive personal information.

PII types

There are many different types of PII, and you can specify which types you want to filter. The set of PII types that can be detected by the filter matches the set that's defined in the Azure AI Language docs.

Filtering modes

The PII filter can be configured to operate in two modes. Annotate mode flags PII that's returned in the model output. Annotate and Block mode blocks the entire output if PII is detected. The filtering mode can be set for each PII category individually.