Customer feedback is full of things you want to analyze - and personal details you don’t need floating around. PII redaction strips those details out before storage and analysis, so your team works with the substance of feedback rather than the identities inside it.

Where to find it

Go to Settings → PII Redaction (under the Organization section). You first configured this during onboarding, but nothing you chose there is set in stone - this page is where you change your mind. Only Admins and Owners can edit it; Members see it read-only.

How it works

The main toggle, Enable PII Redaction, controls automatic redaction. When it’s on, Pilea detects sensitive information - names, emails, phone numbers, addresses, ID numbers, credit cards - and replaces it with labels like [PERSON_NAME].

Redaction happens before storage, so the original text is never saved, and it applies to feedback from all sources - integrations, manual entries, imports, surveys, Slack, all of it. There’s no side door where unredacted feedback slips through into analysis.

You’ll see this in action on the mentions page: mentions that are queued for redaction show the Waiting for redaction state before moving on to analysis.

Redaction fails closed

Analysis only runs on text that redaction has confirmed is safe. If redaction could not complete - the service was unavailable, the result was inconclusive, or a text was too dense with personal data to process - the mention stays in Waiting for redaction and is retried. It is not analysed until redaction succeeds. The same rule applies to survey responses.

In other words, an inconclusive result blocks rather than passes. The only texts analysed without redaction are those received while redaction is switched off.

Per-category control

Redaction isn’t all-or-nothing. Below the main toggle, Categories to redact lets you choose exactly which kinds of PII get removed; unselected categories stay visible. The categories are:

Person
Phone Number
Email
Address
Organization
URL
IP Address
Identity Number
Credit Card Number

A Select all / Deselect all button flips the whole list in one click before fine-tuning.

💡 Tip: Review the category list with your privacy or legal stance in mind. The right configuration depends on what your feedback contains and what your policies require - the switches exist so you don’t have to accept a one-size-fits-all default.

What to expect when you change settings

A few practical notes:

Changes apply to feedback processed going forward - redaction is a step in the pipeline that each mention passes through before it is stored and analysed.
If you disable redaction entirely, mentions skip the Waiting for redaction state and go straight to analysis.
Redaction is independent of your feedback sources. You don’t configure it per integration; one organisation-wide setting governs everything coming in.

ℹ️ Note: Redaction runs before analysis by design. Sentiment, classification, and item linking all operate on the redacted text, so personal details never influence - or leak into - downstream results.

When to revisit this page

Most teams set redaction once and forget it. Come back when:

You’re connecting a new kind of source whose content is more (or less) sensitive than what you’ve handled so far.
Your privacy policy or compliance requirements change.
Your team finds redaction is removing something they legitimately need for analysis - that’s what the per-category switches are for.

Next: Working with mentions

PII redaction settings