# OpenAI Privacy Filter

7 Hacker News commenters recommended OpenAI Privacy Filter and 1 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 2 of 13 months.

**Verdict:** Small model that masks personal information and secrets in text, so it can run locally before data reaches external APIs. Critics note it can miss some data, about 4 percent, so it cannot be treated as proof of anonymization.

## Why people recommend it

- Masks PII and secrets before sending data (2 comments): "It is small enough to run locally, I would pass my request through it first before sending to any apis." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47918832)) "a good example of a model that can be used to mask PII and secrets" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48088943))
- Praised as great and a big deal (2 comments): "The privacy filter is great, but it leaves a gap for non-technical users." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47939044)) "This looks to be a big deal for my use case." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47867416))
- Useful as an extension or pre-processing step (2 comments): "It is small enough to run locally, I would pass my request through it first before sending to any apis." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47918832)) "use the model from OpenAI directly as an extension" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47910891))

## What people warn about

- Fails to redact about 4% of data (1 comments): "How would you actually use this if it can fail redacting 4% of the data." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47908437))

## Alternatives hackers recommend

- [Rampart](https://hackerapproved.com/p/rampart.md): 7 recommend
- [Microsoft Presidio](https://hackerapproved.com/p/microsoft-presidio.md): 5 recommend
- [PII-Shield](https://hackerapproved.com/p/pii-shield.md): 5 recommend

## Cite as

Hacker Approved, "OpenAI Privacy Filter", https://hackerapproved.com/p/openai-privacy-filter/ (counts from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026).