### Description
The feature for pseudonymizing data with ability to retrieve original
text (deanonymization) has been implemented. In order to protect private
data, such as when querying external APIs (OpenAI), it is worth
pseudonymizing sensitive data to maintain full privacy. But then, after
the model response, it would be good to have the data in the original
form.
I implemented the `PresidioReversibleAnonymizer`, which consists of two
parts:
1. anonymization - it works the same way as `PresidioAnonymizer`, plus
the object itself stores a mapping of made-up values to original ones,
for example:
```
{
"PERSON": {
"<anonymized>": "<original>",
"John Doe": "Slim Shady"
},
"PHONE_NUMBER": {
"111-111-1111": "555-555-5555"
}
...
}
```
2. deanonymization - using the mapping described above, it matches fake
data with original data and then substitutes it.
Between anonymization and deanonymization user can perform different
operations, for example, passing the output to LLM.
### Future works
- **instance anonymization** - at this point, each occurrence of PII is
treated as a separate entity and separately anonymized. Therefore, two
occurrences of the name John Doe in the text will be changed to two
different names. It is therefore worth introducing support for full
instance detection, so that repeated occurrences are treated as a single
object.
- **better matching and substitution of fake values for real ones** -
currently the strategy is based on matching full strings and then
substituting them. Due to the indeterminism of language models, it may
happen that the value in the answer is slightly changed (e.g. *John Doe*
-> *John* or *Main St, New York* -> *New York*) and such a substitution
is then no longer possible. Therefore, it is worth adjusting the
matching for your needs.
- **Q&A with anonymization** - when I'm done writing all the
functionality, I thought it would be a cool resource in documentation to
write a notebook about retrieval from documents using anonymization. An
iterative process, adding new recognizers to fit the data, lessons
learned and what to look out for
### Twitter handle
@deepsense_ai / @MaksOpp
---------
Co-authored-by: MaksOpp <maks.operlejn@gmail.com>
Co-authored-by: Bagatur <baskaryan@gmail.com>
Adapting Microsoft Presidio to other languages requires a bit more work,
so for now it will be good idea to remove the language option to choose,
so as not to cause errors and confusion.
https://microsoft.github.io/presidio/analyzer/languages/
I will handle different languages after the weekend 😄
### Description
The feature for anonymizing data has been implemented. In order to
protect private data, such as when querying external APIs (OpenAI), it
is worth pseudonymizing sensitive data to maintain full privacy.
Anonynization consists of two steps:
1. **Identification:** Identify all data fields that contain personally
identifiable information (PII).
2. **Replacement**: Replace all PIIs with pseudo values or codes that do
not reveal any personal information about the individual but can be used
for reference. We're not using regular encryption, because the language
model won't be able to understand the meaning or context of the
encrypted data.
We use *Microsoft Presidio* together with *Faker* framework for
anonymization purposes because of the wide range of functionalities they
provide. The full implementation is available in `PresidioAnonymizer`.
### Future works
- **deanonymization** - add the ability to reverse anonymization. For
example, the workflow could look like this: `anonymize -> LLMChain ->
deanonymize`. By doing this, we will retain anonymity in requests to,
for example, OpenAI, and then be able restore the original data.
- **instance anonymization** - at this point, each occurrence of PII is
treated as a separate entity and separately anonymized. Therefore, two
occurrences of the name John Doe in the text will be changed to two
different names. It is therefore worth introducing support for full
instance detection, so that repeated occurrences are treated as a single
object.
### Twitter handle
@deepsense_ai / @MaksOpp
---------
Co-authored-by: MaksOpp <maks.operlejn@gmail.com>
Co-authored-by: Bagatur <baskaryan@gmail.com>
