biip

biip (Beep + PII) is a tool (and a library) to scrub PII from text.

What does it scrub?

Biip can scrub:

1. Unix (Linux/Mac) username It removes any mention of a user's Unix username from the supplied text, replacing it with user.
2. Home directory It replaces paths referring to the home directory with ~.
3. Emails It replaces any email addresses in the text with a pattern: ***@***.
4. IP Addresses It replaces IPv4 and IPv6 addresses with: ***.***.***.*** and ***:****:*** respectively.
5. Keys / Passwords from environment. It replaces the contents for any potentially sensitive environment variables with: **secret**. It looks for any environment variables that may have these keywords in the name:
   • username
   • password
   • email
   • secret
   • token
   • key

How does it work?

Simply pipe any text to biip to have it scrub away the PII.

For example, if you have content:

Hi, I am "awesome-user"
Current Directory: /Users/awesome-user/foo/bar/baz
My Secret Key: mAM3zwogXpV6Czj6J
My Email: foo@bar.com
My IPs:
- fe80::aaa:8888:ffff:9999
- 192.168.42.42

biip can redact all the sensitive information like this:

$ cat /tmp/info.txt | biip
Hi, I am "user"
Current Directory: ~/foo/bar/baz
My Key: **secret**
My Email: ****@****
My IPs:
- ***:****:***
- ***.***.***.***

How is it useful?

It is useful when you are sharing a large amount of text, but cannot vet it thoroughly enough to look for sensitive information. For instance, when sharing text / logs etc with LLMs or sharing the whole code base with LLM for analysis, it may make sense to run it through biip. Like this:

git ls-files |
 grep -vE 'LICENSE|.gitignore|.lock|.png|.jpg|.svg' |
 xargs -I {} bash -c "echo -e 'File {}:'; cat {}; echo -e '\n-----------------'" |
 biip | pbcopy