General · Philterd

General-Purpose Starter Policy

A balanced starting policy covering common PII types — names, contact info, government IDs, payment data — with no vertical-specific tuning.

View policy → Download JSON → View source on GitHub

v1.0.0 Updated 2026-05-18 Philter >=3.0.0 By Philterd

startergeneraldefault

The policy

The full general-purpose.json file — the same content you’d get by downloading. Copy any part of it, or use the buttons in the hero to grab the whole file.

{
  "name": "general-purpose",
  "config": {
    "splitting": {
      "enabled": false,
      "threshold": 4000
    }
  },
  "ignored": [],
  "identifiers": {
    "personsName": {
      "personsFilterStrategies": [
        {"strategy": "REDACT", "redactionFormat": "{{{REDACTED-%t}}}", "conditions": "confidence > 70"}
      ]
    },
    "phoneNumber": {
      "phoneNumberFilterStrategies": [
        {"strategy": "REDACT", "redactionFormat": "{{{REDACTED-%t}}}"}
      ]
    },
    "emailAddress": {
      "emailAddressFilterStrategies": [
        {"strategy": "REDACT", "redactionFormat": "{{{REDACTED-%t}}}"}
      ]
    },
    "ssn": {
      "ssnFilterStrategies": [
        {"strategy": "REDACT", "redactionFormat": "{{{REDACTED-%t}}}"}
      ]
    },
    "creditCard": {
      "onlyValidCreditCards": true,
      "creditCardFilterStrategies": [
        {"strategy": "REDACT", "redactionFormat": "{{{REDACTED-%t}}}"}
      ]
    },
    "ipAddress": {
      "ipAddressFilterStrategies": [
        {"strategy": "REDACT", "redactionFormat": "{{{REDACTED-%t}}}"}
      ]
    },
    "url": {
      "urlFilterStrategies": [
        {"strategy": "REDACT", "redactionFormat": "{{{REDACTED-%t}}}"}
      ]
    },
    "iban": {
      "ibanFilterStrategies": [
        {"strategy": "REDACT", "redactionFormat": "{{{REDACTED-%t}}}"}
      ]
    },
    "passportNumber": {
      "passportNumberFilterStrategies": [
        {"strategy": "REDACT", "redactionFormat": "{{{REDACTED-%t}}}"}
      ]
    },
    "driversLicense": {
      "driversLicenseFilterStrategies": [
        {"strategy": "REDACT", "redactionFormat": "{{{REDACTED-%t}}}"}
      ]
    }
  }
}

Example

Input

Contact Jane Doe at jane@example.com or 555-867-5309. Card 4111111111111111 on file. License #D1234567.

Output

Contact {{{REDACTED-name}}} at {{{REDACTED-email-address}}} or {{{REDACTED-phone-number}}}. Card {{{REDACTED-credit-card}}} on file. License #{{{REDACTED-drivers-license}}}.

Entities this policy acts on

NAMEPHONEEMAILSSNCREDIT_CARDIPURLIBANPASSPORTDRIVERS_LICENSE

What this policy does

A reasonable default for “I just want to redact common PII without thinking about it too hard.” Catches:

Personal identity: names (confidence-gated to reduce false positives), passport numbers, driver’s license numbers
Contact info: phone numbers, email addresses, URLs, IP addresses
Government identifiers: SSNs
Financial: credit cards (Luhn-validated), IBANs

Does not cover:

Healthcare-specific identifiers (MRN, hospital names) — use a healthcare policy instead
PCI-specific masking (this policy fully redacts cards; for PCI scope reduction with last-4 visible, use pci-dss-scope-reduction.json)
Court-filing rules (use legal policies)
Custom identifiers (MRNs, account numbers, internal IDs) — add identifiers patterns for your domain

When to use this

Quick starts when you’re evaluating Philter against your data
Catch-all log scrubbing in non-regulated environments
Default-deny posture: redact aggressively, then loosen specific entity types as your use case clarifies

When NOT to use this

Regulated workloads. HIPAA, PCI, GDPR, FERPA, and similar regimes have specific requirements — use a policy designed for that framework.
Datasets where over-redaction breaks downstream value. This policy is biased toward over-redaction. For research, ML, or analytics use cases, see the date-shifted clinical-notes policy or build a domain-specific one.

When to customize

Name confidence. Default > 70 is moderately conservative. Lower to > 50 for higher recall (catches more rare/foreign names at the cost of false positives on capitalized common words). Raise to > 85 for higher precision.
URL and IP redaction. Some applications need to retain these for analytics. Remove the url or ipAddress entries if so.
Add custom identifiers for any deployment-specific patterns: internal customer IDs, ticket numbers, employee badges, etc.

Tuning workflow

Run this policy against a representative sample of your data.
Inspect the redactions. Note any over-redaction (legitimate text caught) or under-redaction (PII missed).
Tighten thresholds, add ignored terms, or add custom identifiers patterns based on what you find.
Re-evaluate. Repeat until precision and recall meet your bar.

Philter Scope automates step 3 — score policy changes against a gold-standard test set so you can measure regressions instead of guessing at them.

Use this policy

Download and load into your running Philter instance:

# Download the policy
curl -O https://raw.githubusercontent.com/philterd/pii-redaction-policies/main/policies/philterd/general/general-purpose.json

# Upload to your Philter instance
curl -X POST http://localhost:8080/api/policies \
     -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
     --data @general-purpose.json

# Redact text using the policy
curl http://localhost:8080/api/filter?p=general-purpose \
     --data "your text here" \
     -H "Content-Type: text/plain"

No Philter instance yet? Deploy one in 5 minutes → · Want to tune this policy against your data? Talk to the team.

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