---
license: cc-by-nc-4.0
language:
  - en
  - fr
  - de
  - it
  - es
  - nl
library_name: transformers
pipeline_tag: token-classification
tags:
  - pii
  - privacy
  - redaction
  - accessibility-tree
  - ocr
  - computer-use
  - agentic
  - screen-capture
  - screenpipe
metrics:
  - f1
  - recall
  - precision
extra_gated_prompt: >-
  This model is licensed CC BY-NC 4.0 (non-commercial). For commercial
  use — production deployment, SaaS / API embedding, agent privacy
  middleware, custom fine-tunes — contact louis@screenpi.pe.
---

# screenpipe-pii-redactor

> A [screenpipe](https://screenpi.pe) project.

screenpipe's own PII redactor, purpose-built for the **three surfaces an
AI agent actually sees a user's machine through**:

1. **Accessibility-tree dumps** — the structured AX hierarchy macOS /
   Windows expose to assistive tech. Short, structured, full of labels
   like `AXButton[Send to marcus@helios-ai.io]`.
2. **OCR'd screen text** — what tools like screenpipe extract from screen
   recordings: window-title-shaped artifacts, app chrome, and the
   occasional long-form email or doc.
3. **Computer-use traces** — what an agentic model (Claude Computer Use,
   GPT operators, etc.) reads when it drives a desktop.

These surfaces are short, sparse-context, and full of identifiers that
slip past redactors trained on chat-style prose. This is a compact,
multilingual token classifier trained in-house specifically for them.
**It is not OpenAI's Privacy Filter, and it is not a fine-tune of one** —
it's screenpipe's own model. 278 MB INT8 ONNX, ~9 ms p50 on CPU, runs
fully offline.

> **License: CC BY-NC 4.0** (non-commercial). For commercial use —
> production redaction, SaaS / API embedding, AI-agent privacy
> middleware, custom fine-tunes — contact **louis@screenpi.pe**. See
> [`LICENSE`](LICENSE).

## Headline numbers

On [**ScreenLeak**](https://github.com/screenpipe/screenleak), our open
benchmark for PII redaction on screen telemetry — n=422 hand-labelled
desktop-telemetry strings, 13 categories, strict per-string zero-leak
(every PII span in the string must be caught):

| Model | Zero-leak | |
|---|---:|---|
| Gemini 3.1 Pro | 91.0% | cloud API |
| GPT-5.5 | 90.7% | cloud API |
| Claude Opus 4.7 | 87.8% | cloud API |
| **this model** ⭐ | **86.7%** | **local · 278 MB · ~9 ms CPU · $0/call** |
| Google Cloud DLP | 37.7% | cloud API |
| Microsoft Presidio | 35.4% | local OSS |

Within a few points of the frontier APIs, ~50 points above the flagship
commercial PII products — at zero per-call cost, fully offline. Full
methodology, confidence intervals, and per-framework (HIPAA / GDPR /
PCI DSS / …) breakdowns:
[github.com/screenpipe/screenleak](https://github.com/screenpipe/screenleak).
**Try it in your browser:** [screenpipe.github.io/screenleak/demo](https://screenpipe.github.io/screenleak/demo/).

## What it does

Span-level redaction. Given a string, returns the regions it thinks are
PII, each classified into one of **12 canonical categories**:

```
private_person, private_email, private_phone, private_address,
private_url, private_company, private_repo, private_handle,
private_channel, private_id, private_date, secret
```

`secret` covers passwords, API keys, JWTs, DB connection strings,
PRIVATE-KEY block markers, etc.

> **Tip:** screenpipe redacts **each captured fragment independently**
> (one AX node / OCR line / window title at a time) — that's the
> distribution the model is tuned for. Feeding a giant multi-entity blob
> in a single call degrades recall; split on natural boundaries first.

## Inference

**Browser (transformers.js):**

```js
import { pipeline } from "@huggingface/transformers";
const pii = await pipeline("token-classification", "screenpipe/pii-redactor", { dtype: "q8" });
const out = await pii("export OPENAI_API_KEY=sk-proj-Ab12Cd34Ef56Gh78");
// out: per-token tags; group consecutive B-/I- tags into spans
```

**Python (transformers):**

```python
# pip install transformers torch
from transformers import AutoTokenizer, AutoModelForTokenClassification
import torch

tok   = AutoTokenizer.from_pretrained("screenpipe/pii-redactor")
model = AutoModelForTokenClassification.from_pretrained("screenpipe/pii-redactor").eval()
id2label = model.config.id2label

def redact(text):
    enc = tok(text, return_offsets_mapping=True, return_tensors="pt", truncation=True)
    offsets = enc.pop("offset_mapping")[0].tolist()
    with torch.no_grad():
        pred = model(**enc).logits.argmax(-1)[0].tolist()
    # decode BIO from offsets + argmax (aggregation_strategy is unreliable
    # for this tokenizer — walk the offsets yourself)
    spans, cur = [], None
    for (s, e), p in zip(offsets, pred):
        if s == e:                       # special token
            cur = None; continue
        lab = id2label[p]
        if lab == "O":
            cur = None; continue
        base = lab.split("-", 1)[-1]
        if cur and cur["label"] == base and not lab.startswith("B-"):
            cur["end"] = e
        else:
            cur = {"start": s, "end": e, "label": base}; spans.append(cur)
    return [(d["start"], d["end"], d["label"], text[d["start"]:d["end"]]) for d in spans]

print(redact("export OPENAI_API_KEY=sk-proj-Ab12Cd34Ef56Gh78"))
# -> [(..., ..., 'secret', 'sk-proj-Ab12Cd34Ef56Gh78')]
```

Production INT8 ONNX weights are in [`onnx/`](onnx/) — load with
`onnxruntime` on any platform (CoreML / DirectML / CUDA / CPU baseline);
the same file ships everywhere.

## Multilingual

Handles 6 languages (en, fr, de, it, es, nl). English is strongest;
Dutch is the weakest and is flagged as a known gap. Validate on your
locale before deploying.

## Limitations

1. **Sudo / login password prompts can leak.** `[sudo] password for
   alice: hunter2` may redact the username but survive the password.
   Pair with an OS-level keystroke-suppression policy.
2. **Multi-entity blobs degrade recall** — redact per captured fragment
   (see tip above), not one giant concatenated string.
3. **Synthetic training data only.** No real user data was used. Validate
   on YOUR data before deploying.
4. **Over-redaction (oversmash).** The model errs toward redacting — good
   for privacy-first deployments; flag it if you need clean text
   downstream.
5. **Strict zero-leak metric.** Absolute numbers depend on the
   evaluator's taxonomy and metric; macro-F1 is a more lenient lens.

## License

[CC BY-NC 4.0](LICENSE) — non-commercial use only. See [`NOTICE`](NOTICE)
for third-party component attributions.

For commercial licensing (production deployment, redistribution, SaaS /
API embedding, custom fine-tunes for your domain): **louis@screenpi.pe**.

## Citation

```bibtex
@misc{screenpipe-pii-redactor-2026,
  title  = {screenpipe-pii-redactor: a PII redactor for accessibility
            trees, OCR'd screen text, and computer-use traces},
  author = {{screenpipe}},
  year   = {2026},
  url    = {https://huggingface.co/screenpipe/pii-redactor}
}
```