Show HN: Local personal data redaction for any AI tools

A developer released PII GUI, a free, open-source desktop app that detects and redacts personal information in PDFs, Markdown, and text files entirely on-device using regex or local ONNX models, with no data ever leaving the machine. The Tauri 2 app, built with React and Rust, supports custom rules, per-match review, and true PDF redaction, and is available for macOS, Windows, and Linux.

Find and redact personal information in documents — entirely on your device. Load a PDF, markdown, or text file, detect PII with built-in rules or local ONNX models, review every match, and export a safely redacted copy. No document content ever leaves your machine. Example example · Features features · Detection Backends detection-backends · Setup setup · Development development · Roadmap roadmap PII GUI is a Tauri 2 desktop app React 19 + TypeScript frontend, Rust backend for local-first PII detection and redaction. Detection runs on-device with regex rules or quantized ONNX models; the only network access is the optional one-time model download. PII GUI supports two local workflows. Local inference only — PII detection runs entirely on-device. The only network access is the optional one-time model download from Hugging Face. PDF, Markdown, and plain-text input — PDFs are parsed with pdf.js, preserving per-character positions so detections are highlighted directly on the rendered page. Custom rules — add your own regex or exact-match filters on top of any backend. Review before redacting — toggle individual matches on or off in the workbench before export. True PDF redaction — exported PDFs burn opaque rectangles into the rendered pages with pdf-lib, so redacted text is not recoverable from the output file. Task history and persistence — tabs, custom rules, and filter results survive restarts via a local SQLite database and on-disk result files. Long-document support — input is split into token-bounded, page-aware chunks and processed through a task queue. Localized UI — English, Korean, and Japanese. | Backend | Best for | |---|---| Regex built-in | Instant baseline detection of emails, phones, URLs, dates, account numbers, and secrets | | Long English documents and broad privacy-taxonomy detection | | European-language text where names, addresses, and ID-like entities matter | Matches are labeled with a fixed privacy taxonomy: account number · private address · private email · private person · private phone · private url · private date · secret - Node.js 24+ - pnpm - Rust and Cargo - Tauri v2 platform prerequisites for your OS Download the latest installer for macOS, Windows, or Linux from the Releases https://github.com/sophia486/pii-gui/releases page. On first launch, the onboarding flow lets you pick a default backend. Regex works immediately; the ONNX models are optional downloads fetched from Hugging Face into the app data directory, and removable at any time from Settings . Install from source: cd tauri pnpm install Local release signing values are optional for development. If you need updater signing locally, copy the environment template and fill in your own key: cp .env.example .env Document PDF / md / txt → text extraction pdf.js, per-character boxes for PDFs → token-bounded, page-aware chunking → task queue → Rust redact text command → regex / ONNX inference ort + tokenizers → matches + redacted text → review & toggle matches in the UI → export burned-in PDF redaction or redacted text The frontend React handles document parsing, chunking, review, and export. The Rust backend src-tauri/ owns the detection engines, model lifecycle download / verify / delete , and file I/O — all writes are confined to the Tauri app data directory. cd tauri pnpm install pnpm tauri dev cd tauri pnpm tauri build cd tauri pnpm test:unit frontend unit tests vitest pnpm build typecheck + frontend build cd src-tauri cargo test Rust backend tests - Local regex detection and review workflow - Optional ONNX backend wiring for OpenAI Privacy Filter and BardsAI EU PII - Burned-in PDF redaction export - Local tab, custom-rule, and result persistence - Broader import/export QA for large PDFs and multilingual documents - Accessibility and keyboard-only review pass - Integration with coding agents Codex, Claude Code, Cursor tauri/ the desktop app src/ React frontend App.tsx orchestrator: tabs, routing, workbench components/ PDF preview, shadcn/Radix UI primitives lib/ pdf-document.ts pdf.js text + char-box extraction pii-text-chunks.ts token-bounded chunking pii-task-queue.ts detection task queue redaction-policy.ts match merge/select/restore logic pdf-redacted-export.ts burned-in PDF redaction export app-persistence.ts SQLite + result-file persistence i18n.ts en / ko / ja UI copy src-tauri/ Rust backend src/lib.rs Tauri commands: redact text, model lifecycle, file I/O src/redact engine.rs regex / ONNX / BardsAI detection backends docs/assets/ README thumbnail and screenshot assets .github/workflows/release.yml cross-platform release builds Contributions are welcome Bug reports & feature requests — open an issue https://github.com/sophia486/pii-gui/issues with steps to reproduce or a short description of the use case. Pull requests — keep changes small and focused. Before submitting, run the checks for the area you touched:- Frontend: pnpm test:unit and pnpm build from tauri/ - Rust backend: cargo test from tauri/src-tauri/ - Frontend: Detection quality — false positives/negatives are especially useful to report; include the backend regex / Privacy Filter / BardsAI and a minimal, PII-free sample that reproduces the issue. Benchmarks — keep local benchmark scripts and outputs out of commits; /benchmarks/ is ignored. PII GUI is licensed under the GNU Affero General Public License v3.0 /sophia486/pii-gui/blob/main/LICENSE . PII GUI builds on several open-source projects and model releases: pdf.js https://mozilla.github.io/pdf.js/ and pdf-lib https://pdf-lib.js.org/ for PDF parsing and export. ONNX Runtime https://onnxruntime.ai/ and tokenizers https://github.com/huggingface/tokenizers for local model inference. OpenAI Privacy Filter https://huggingface.co/openai/privacy-filter and BardsAI EU PII https://huggingface.co/bardsai/eu-pii-anonimization-multilang for optional local PII detection models. Run the smallest check that proves the change, then widen as needed: cd tauri && pnpm test:unit cd tauri && pnpm build cd tauri/src-tauri && cargo check git diff --check For packaging, run pnpm tauri build on the target platform before making release claims.