Supported Filters

This page lists every kind of sensitive information Philter Desktop can find. Each one is a filter, a detector you can switch on or off. You turn on the ones you need in the Policy Editor, and control how each replaces what it finds using filter strategies.

A typical policy turns on just the handful that matter for your documents. The detectors are grouped by category.

Personal

Information about who a person is.

First Name: a person's given name (e.g., Jane).
Surname: a person's family or last name (e.g., Doe).
Age: a stated age (e.g., 42 years old).
Names (on-device AI): a context-aware detector for full person names, powered by artificial intelligence that runs entirely on your computer. Because the same word can be a name or an ordinary word depending on the sentence, this detector is more reliable than a simple rule. See AI name detection below.

Contact

Ways of reaching a person.

Email Address: e.g., jane.doe@example.com.
Phone Number: e.g., (555) 123-4567.
Phone Number Extension: an extension that follows a phone number (e.g., ext. 204).

Location

Where a person is or lives.

City
County
State: the full state name (e.g., California).
State Abbreviation: the two-letter form (e.g., CA).
Zip Code
Street Address: a US-style street address — a house number plus street name and a common street type (St, Ave, Blvd, Loop, Crossing, ...), including directionals, an apartment/suite/unit, and PO Box lines (e.g., 123 N Main St, Apt 4 or PO Box 1234). It is oriented to US/English address formats, so addresses in other formats may not be caught; review location-heavy documents.

Financial

Money- and account-related details that often appear in discovery, bank statements, and billing records.

Credit Card: a credit-card number.
Bank Routing Number: the bank-identifying number on checks and transfers.
IBAN Code: an International Bank Account Number, used for international transfers.
Bitcoin Address: an identifier for a cryptocurrency wallet.
Currency: a monetary amount (e.g., $5,000.00).

Identifiers

Official numbers that single out a specific person or thing.

SSN (Social Security Number): e.g., 123-45-6789.
Driver's License: a driver's license number.
Passport Number
VIN (Vehicle Identification Number): the unique number identifying a specific vehicle.
Tracking Number: a shipment/package tracking number.

Technical

Identifiers from computers and networks. These often turn up in emails, logs, and digital records produced in discovery.

IP Address: the numeric address of a device on a network (e.g., 192.168.0.1).
MAC Address: a hardware identifier built into a network device.
URL: a web address (e.g., https://example.com/page).

Medical

Hospital: the name of a hospital or medical facility, common in personal-injury and medical-records work.

Other

Date: a calendar date (e.g., January 5, 2024). Dates can be sensitive on their own: a date of birth, a date of treatment, or a date of incident.

AI name detection

The Names (on-device AI) detector (in the Personal group above) finds person names using a trained artificial-intelligence model (called PhEye) that runs entirely on your own computer, with no connection to the internet. Your documents are never uploaded or sent anywhere.

Names benefit from this approach because they have no fixed shape and depend on the surrounding words; the pattern-based detectors above handle everything else. For the full explanation and how to turn it on, see Policies → AI name detection.

Your own identifiers (Custom Identifiers)

To remove information that follows your organization's own format (a case number, a client matter ID, an internal account number), you can define your own detectors. See Policies → Custom Identifiers.

The list of available detectors comes from the redaction engine inside Philter Desktop, so it may grow as new versions are released. The Policy Editor always shows the detectors available in your installed version, so it is the definitive, up-to-date list.