I’ve launched a new macOS app: PII Offline Remover — it detects and redacts personal data in text and PDF documents. Names, national ID numbers, IBANs, addresses, emails, phone numbers and 17 more — 23 entity types in total.
You can find it on the Mac App Store.
Why I built it
We send more and more text to AI assistants: contracts, applications, official letters, emails. And that text is full of personal data — yours or, worse, your clients’. Once it’s sent to the cloud, you no longer control it.
Most anonymization tools have the very problem they claim to solve: they upload your document to their servers in order to “protect” it. That always struck me as absurd.
The difference: everything runs locally
Nothing ever leaves your computer. The AI model runs natively on your Mac — no cloud, no account, no internet connection needed while you work. You can turn off your network entirely and the app works exactly the same.
Under the hood there’s a language model trained specifically for Romanian documents (names, national IDs, addresses, companies, institutions), running natively in Rust. On top of it sits a deterministic verification layer: for strictly formatted fields — national ID numbers, tax IDs, IBANs — the app mathematically validates the checksum instead of just “guessing”. A valid ID gets caught even when the model hesitates.
What it does, concretely
- Anonymize text or PDFs — paste text or drop a PDF into the app, and the detected entities show up highlighted by type in a visual editor. You confirm, adjust, export.
- Choose exactly what gets redacted — want to hide only ID numbers and IBANs but keep city names? Just tick what you care about.
- Anonymization is reversible — every document generates a dictionary you can use to restore the original text. My favorite scenario: anonymize a contract, send it to an LLM for analysis, then put the real values back into the answer. The AI never saw the real data.
Who it’s for
Anyone who works with other people’s documents: lawyers, accountants, HR, doctors, public servants — or simply you, when you want an AI’s help with a personal document without handing over your identity along with it.
Try it
The app is on the Mac App Store, with a 3-day free trial. On first launch it downloads the AI model (once), and from then on you’re fully offline.
Your data is yours. It should stay that way.
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