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# PII Redaction at Index Time

* **Mask PII before it's embedded or stored**: set `mask_pii: true` on any indexing request and Captain detects and masks personally identifiable information in the parsed content **after parsing, before embedding**. Nothing unmasked reaches the search index, the chunk text, the returned regions, or the stored figure crops. It's opt-in and per-job; the flag defaults to `false`, so existing indexing is unchanged. See [PII Masking](/guides/pii-masking).
* **Text**: detected PII is replaced with entity tags: `<PERSON>`, `<EMAIL_ADDRESS>`, `<US_SSN>`, `<PHONE_NUMBER>`, `<CREDIT_CARD>`, and other high-value identifiers. Dates and generic numbers are intentionally left alone.
* **Images**: for standalone image files *and* images embedded in PDFs, PII text visible in the pixels is covered with solid boxes, so both the stored, retrievable image and its visual embedding are redacted.
* **Regions**: when you query with `include.regions`, the per-region text is masked too, so the layout view carries no raw PII either.