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PII Identification

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Use Claira to detect and extract personally identifiable information from documents in Nuix Discover.

PII Identification

Data breach notifications, regulatory compliance, and privacy assessments all require you to know what personal information lives in your documents. Manually scanning thousands of files for names, emails, national identifiers, and addresses is slow and error-prone.

Claira can read through extracted text and flag personally identifiable information (PII), saving your team significant time while reducing the risk of missing something.

How Claira helps

  • Detects multiple PII types. Names, email addresses, phone numbers, government-issued identifiers, physical addresses, financial account numbers, and more. The prompt describes identifiers by function rather than by name, so it is not tied to any one country.
  • Supports compliance workflows. Whether you are responding to a breach notification requirement, a subject access request, or a regulatory audit, Claira helps you identify what needs attention.
  • Works at scale. Run PII identification across a full document set in a single bulk scan.

When to use this

  • Breach notification and incident response
  • Privacy impact assessments
  • Preparing documents for production with redaction lists
  • Subject access requests under GDPR, CCPA, or similar regulations

Sample prompts

You can tailor your PII prompt depending on how targeted or comprehensive you need the results to be.

The comprehensive "surface forms" prompt below is also available in the app under Investigations > Comprehensive PII (surface forms) in the template picker, with a full help article here.

Comprehensive PII extraction (unique surface forms)

Use this when you need every distinct written form of PII, without normalization, in a single machine-friendly line of quoted values. The format below is a good input for Search Term Families in Nuix Discover: each value (or a group you treat as one family) can become grouped search or QC terms across the collection, without retyping every variant the model found.

The prompt below names no country. Its EXPECTED IN THIS COLLECTION block is where you say which jurisdiction your documents come from; the template article has ready-made blocks for Canada, Australia, the United Kingdom and Germany/EU. Delete that section if you would rather not narrow it.
◈Comprehensive PII Prompt (unique surface forms)

Extract every unique instance of Personally Identifiable Information (PII) from this document. PII includes, but is not limited to: full names, partial names, initials, nicknames, titles with names (e.g., Mr. Doe, Dr. Smith), email addresses, phone numbers, physical addresses, dates of birth, government-issued identifiers, financial account numbers, medical record numbers, IP addresses, and usernames.

Government-issued identifiers are in scope whatever country issued them and whatever they are called locally: tax and revenue numbers, social insurance and social security numbers, national identity numbers, health and medical insurance numbers, passport numbers, and driver's licence numbers all qualify. Treat any number that functions as an official reference to a person as an identifier, even if you do not recognize the scheme.

Do not include dates or URLs that are not contained in email addresses.

EXPECTED IN THIS COLLECTION

>>> REPLACE THIS BLOCK WITH THE JURISDICTIONS IN THIS COLLECTION, OR DELETE THIS SECTION <<<

The block above is a hint about what to expect, never a limit: identifiers and formats from any other country are still PII and must still be extracted.

Follow these rules exactly:

  • Output every unique surface form of each PII instance exactly as it appears in the document. If the same person, address, or other entity is written in multiple formats, include each distinct format as a separate entry (e.g., "John Doe", "J. Doe", "Mr. Doe", "Doe, John").
  • Do not include duplicates of the exact same formatted string. Each entry in the output must be unique character-for-character.
  • Do not normalize, correct, reformat, expand, or abbreviate any value. Preserve original casing, punctuation, spacing, and spelling, including apparent typos.
  • For addresses, include each distinct written format separately. The same address counts more than once when the street type is abbreviated in one place and spelled out in another, or when the city, region, or postal code is present in one form and absent in another.
  • For phone numbers, include each distinct written format separately. The same number counts more than once when it is written with and without a country code, with different digit groupings, or with different separators (spaces, hyphens, brackets, dots).
  • Wrap each value in straight double quotation marks. Separate entries with a comma. Do not use line breaks, bullets, numbering, curly braces, square brackets, or any other wrapper or delimiter.
  • Do not include any introductory text, explanatory text, headings, labels, categories, counts, trailing commentary, or closing remarks. The response must begin with the first quotation mark and end with the final quotation mark. If no PII is found, output exactly: "NO PII DETECTED"

Targeted extraction

Use this when you know exactly which PII types you are looking for and want a simple paired list instead of a full unique-form sweep.

◈Targeted PII Prompt

Identify all names and email addresses. Pair in format: [Name] <[email]> // [Name] <[email]>

Tips for better results

Start with the comprehensive prompt on a small sample to understand what PII types are present in your collection. Then switch to a targeted prompt for the bulk scan if you only need specific types.
  • Search Term Families. The comprehensive prompt output is a strong input for Search Term Families in Nuix Discover: each returned string (or a set you group manually) can seed a family for search and QC. Adjust membership as needed before running matter-wide.
  • Specify the format you need. If downstream tools expect a different structure (for example, a narrative redaction log), say so in the prompt, or use the targeted example when paired fields are enough.
  • Handle raw PII in stored review fields with care. The comprehensive format lists values as they appear in the text. Limit field visibility and follow your organization's data-handling and retention policy.
  • Combine with human review. PII identification is high-stakes. Use Claira output as a starting point, then have a reviewer confirm before acting on the results.
Claira analyzes extracted text only. If PII appears in images, handwritten notes, or scanned documents with poor OCR quality, it may not be detected. Always verify OCR quality before relying on AI-based PII extraction.

Need help? Contact support@claira.to

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