pii-lens

Highlight credit cards, emails, phone numbers, SSNs, and US bank numbers in a log or a prompt before you paste it into ChatGPT, Claude, Cursor, or an open API.

cat logs.txt | pii-lens

Matches render in the terminal as bold white text on a red background. Under the payload, pii-lens prints how many high-risk secrets it found and which types they were.

[6] High-Risk Secrets Detected in Payload
CREDIT_CARD: 1  EMAIL_ADDRESS: 1  PHONE_NUMBER: 1  SSN: 1  US_BANK_NUMBER: 2

Install

pip install pii-lens

Python 3.10 or newer. On Windows, if the shield glyph in the closing panel does not render, run $env:PYTHONUTF8 = "1" first.

Work on the source tree:

python -m venv .venv
.venv\Scripts\activate
pip install -e ".[dev]"
pii-lens --file examples/sample.txt

Usage

pii-lens --file logs.txt
cat logs.txt | pii-lens
Get-Content -Raw logs.txt | pii-lens

--engine auto is the default. It always runs the built-in patterns. If Microsoft Presidio is installed, those hits are merged in too:

pip install "pii-lens[presidio]"
pii-lens --engine presidio --file logs.txt

Pass --engine regex to use only the built-in scanner. A finished scan exits 0. Running it in a terminal with no file and no pipe exits 1.

What it flags

examples/sample.txt is synthetic. Order ids, dates, and ticket numbers in that file are left alone.

The built-in scanner does not need a spaCy model, so it starts immediately. Presidio is optional extra coverage.

For coding agents

When someone asks you to check a file, prompt, log, or payload for personal data, run:

pii-lens --file PATH

Read the summary line. The integer in [N] High-Risk Secrets Detected in Payload is the number of spans. The next line lists counts by entity. Quote those counts. Do not send the raw payload to another model if N is greater than 0.

Machine-readable overview: llms.txt.

Keep the pipeline private

Don't send a dirty payload to an open API. CounselNode's VPC Sidecar redacts these tokens before they hit the LLM and processes them on private infrastructure.

Secure your pipeline: https://counselnode.com

License

MIT. See LICENSE.