Philterd

Talk to an Expert

Tell us about your stack and the privacy problems you're trying to solve. We typically respond within one business day.

Prefer to skip the form? Pick a time on our calendar →
or send a message

Please do not enter PII or PHI in this form. If you need to share an example, use a sanitized one.

← All lenses

PII Lens

German PII

German-language PII detection for documents from Germany, Austria, and Switzerland — including Steuer-ID and Personalausweis identifiers.

  • Status available
  • License Apache-2.0
  • Version 1.0.0
  • Updated 2026-05-22
  • PhEye compatibility >=1.0.0
  • Languages de
  • Model size 195 MB
  • Author Philterd

Entities detected

  • PERSON
  • LOCATION
  • ORG
  • STEUER_ID
  • PERSONALAUSWEIS
  • PHONE
  • ADDRESS

When to load this lens

Load this lens for German-language text. Healthcare and contact-center workloads in DACH markets typically pair it with General Purpose and the domain-specific lens.

Pairs well with

  • General Purpose — Broad PII baseline for documents that don't fit a specific domain — customer-support tickets, internal correspondence, generic business records. The default lens loaded by PhEye when no other is specified.
  • Healthcare — Clinical-text lens trained for entities that matter in EHR exports, clinical notes, discharge summaries, and medical-chatbot transcripts — higher recall than general NER on the healthcare-specific surface.

What this lens detects

PII in German-language text, including:

  • Person names — German, Austrian, and Swiss-German naming conventions including von-prefixed surnames and umlaut variants.
  • Locations and organizations — German address format (Hauptstraße 12, 80331 München), Austrian and Swiss-German address conventions.
  • Steuer-ID — German tax identifier, 11 digits.
  • Personalausweis — German national ID card number, 9 alphanumeric characters with checksum.
  • Phone numbers — German (+49), Austrian (+43), Swiss (+41) phone formats.
  • Addresses — German-language address conventions including PLZ (postal code) patterns.

When to use this

  • Documents from Germany, Austria, Switzerland (German regions), Liechtenstein.
  • DACH healthcare — clinical text in German; combine with the Healthcare lens for the broader clinical vocabulary.
  • DSGVO-driven workflows. Germany’s data-protection enforcement is strict; data minimization with self-hosted detection is the standard pattern. The lens supports the GDPR / DSGVO compliance posture.
  • Bilingual environments — combine with General Purpose for English / German mixed documents (common in multinational enterprise records).

Known limitations

  • Umlaut handling. Documents that have been transliterated (ä → ae, ö → oe) get reduced recall — the lens recognizes both forms but is calibrated against well-formed text.
  • Swiss-German dialect. Written text in Swiss-German dialect (uncommon in formal documents but appears in informal correspondence) has lower recall than High German.
  • Austrian-specific identifiers (such as the Sozialversicherungsnummer) are recognized as generic identifiers; specific Austrian / Swiss-specific structured identifiers may benefit from a custom-identifier regex in the policy layer.

Use this lens with PhEye, Phileas, or Philter

PhEye loads this lens at configuration time and exposes it to Phileas and Philter automatically. Have questions about a specific deployment? Talk to the team.

About PhEye →