PrivacyScrubber

PrivacyScrubber is a browser-based privacy tool that removes personal information from text before you paste it into AI chatbots like ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini. It spots names, email addresses, phone numbers, home addresses, Social Security numbers, salary figures, API keys and medical details, then replaces them with placeholders such as [NAME_1] or [EMAIL_1]. All processing happens in the browser's memory, so the original text never leaves your device.

You can type or paste text directly, upload files in PDF, DOCX, XLSX, CSV or TXT format, or scan images with on-device OCR. The Chrome extension adds another layer: it watches prompts as you type in nine LLM chat interfaces and masks sensitive items before you press send. A local semantic AI model (about 35MB, downloaded on first use) helps catch contextual PII that simple pattern matching misses, and you can define custom regex rules for internal account numbers or employee IDs. After the AI responds, paste the output back and click "Reveal Originals" to swap placeholders for real data — again in local RAM.

PrivacyScrubber is aimed at teams that work with sensitive data and rely on AI daily. Developers use it to debug logs and database dumps without exposing secrets. Healthcare, finance and legal teams scrub patient records, contracts and financial documents before sharing them with chatbots. Compliance officers get audit-ready receipts showing nothing was uploaded. The tool includes industry profiles for HIPAA and GDPR, plus an MCP server and Node SDK for adding sanitization to existing pipelines.