Personally Identifiable Information (PII)

Personally Identifiable Information (PII) is any data that can identify an individual - a name, email, government ID, account number, or biometric - either on its own or combined with other data. It is the central category in privacy regulation such as GDPR and HIPAA, and the thing most data-protection controls are built to guard.

AI multiplies the ways PII escapes: it can ride out in a prompt to a hosted model, surface in a response, or be pulled in by retrieval. Detecting PII on the data path and redacting or blocking it before a prompt crosses the boundary keeps regulated identifiers inside the perimeter while still letting teams use AI - privacy enforced at runtime rather than promised in a policy.