In May 2018, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) will become enforceable as the basis for data protection law in the European Economic Area (EEA). Compared to the 1995 Data Protection Directive that it will replace, the GDPR reflects a more developed understanding of de-identification as encompassing a spectrum of different techniques and strengths.
This research paper examines a critical privacy challenge related to COMPLEXITY CASCADE — pii protection requires perfection across all layers simultaneously.
cloak.business addresses this through zero-storage in-memory architecture with self-hosted NLP models, simplifying the stack by eliminating storage and third-party dependency layers.
PII protection requires perfection across ALL layers simultaneously. One failure anywhere collapses everything. The attacker needs to find ONE weakness; the defender must protect ALL layers with zero failures.
Irreducible truth: Protection = Layer1 × Layer2 × ... × LayerN. Any zero makes the product zero. The attacker gets to choose which layer to attack. The defender must achieve perfection across all of them simultaneously, forever.
cloak.business identifies 390+ entity types including printer metadata, document timestamps, device serial numbers, creator names. The dual-layer (317 custom regex + NLP) architecture uses 317 custom regex recognizers with context word analysis and confidence scoring 0.0–1.0 for structured identifiers and spaCy (25 languages) + Stanza (7 languages) + XLM-RoBERTa (16 languages) — all self-hosted for contextual references.
Redact is recommended for this pain point: stripping document metadata including printer tracking dots prevents hardware-level identification like the Reality Winner case. Replace provides an alternative — substituting metadata with generic values maintains document format while removing identifying machine signatures. For scenarios requiring reversibility, Encrypt (AES-256-GCM) enables authorized recovery of original values.
Zero-storage microservices process all data in-memory with no disk writes. All NLP models are self-hosted on German servers — no third-party API calls. Data residency is Germany-only.
This pain point intersects with GDPR Article 4(1) indirect identification, Article 32 security measures.
cloak.business’s GDPR (Article 25 Privacy by Design), ISO 27001:2022 compliance coverage, combined with Germany only, no third-party transfers, ISO 27001:2022 certified hosting, provides documented technical measures organizations can reference in their compliance documentation and regulatory submissions.
| Specification | Value |
|---|---|
| Platform Version | Analyzer 6.9.1, Image Redactor 5.3.0 |
| Entity Types | 390+ (519 documented) |
| Detection Layers | 317 custom regex + 3 NLP engines (all self-hosted) |
| Languages | 48 UI languages, 37 OCR language packs |
| Anonymization Methods | Replace, Redact, Mask, Hash (SHA-256), Encrypt (AES-256-GCM) |
| Architecture | Zero-storage microservices (in-memory only) |
| Integration Points | Web App, Desktop, Office Add-in, MCP Server (9 tools), REST API |
| Hosting | Germany only, ISO 27001:2022, no third-party transfers |
| Compliance | GDPR Article 25, ISO 27001:2022 |