Microsoft Presidio: How I Learned to Stop Writing Regex and Love the Recognizer
So, What is This Presidio Thing? Alright, let’s get technical. Presidio is an open-source library from Microsoft for finding and anonymizing PII. Think of it like a two-part system: The Analyzer Engine: This is the detective. It scans your text and looks for anything that looks like PII—names, phone numbers, credit cards, you name it. It’s not just one big regex; it’s a whole team of “recognizers” that use a mix of NLP (like spaCy), regular expressions, and even checksums to be extra sure. The Anonymizer Engine: This is the guy with the big black marker. Once the Analyzer finds the PII, the Anonymizer scrubs it out. But it’s smarter than just deleting things. You can tell it how to anonymize. You can redact, mask, replace with fake data, or even encrypt it if you need to get the original data back later. The best part? It’s all pluggable. You don’t like the default NLP model? Swap it out. Need to find a super-specific, internal-only customer ID format? You can write your own recognizer for it. This is good, because it means you’re not stuck with whatever Microsoft decided was a good idea in 2018. ...