Organization detection

Detecting organization names is harder than detecting people. Presidio's default build disables organization detection because generic NER is noisy. The guardrail turns it on and gives you two layers to combine.

The two layers

Layer	Catches	Precision	Configure
NER	any org-looking name	good, but occasionally over-flags	presidio.analyzer.nerOrganization
Deny-list	only names you list	perfect (exact match)	presidio.analyzer.organizations

NER is on by default, so organizations are masked even before you curate a list. For known clients and companies, add a deny-list — it never produces a false positive and always catches the names you care about.

Add your organizations (Helm)

presidio:
  analyzer:
    nerOrganization: true          # baseline defense (default)
    organizations:                 # high-precision exact matches
      - Novartis
      - Roche
      - Contoso Ltd

Names are matched case-insensitively at word boundaries. When the list is non-empty, the chart mounts a full Presidio recognizer registry with your deny-list added.

Choosing a strategy

• Just getting started / unknown inputs → leave NER on, no deny-list. You get automatic coverage with some noise.
• Known roster of clients → add them to the deny-list. This is the high-value case for a business or legal workflow.
• Zero tolerance for false positives → set nerOrganization: false and rely solely on the deny-list.

Local development

The repository's docker-compose.yml mounts the same configuration from deploy/presidio/ so organization detection works out of the box when you run the stack locally. Edit deploy/presidio/recognizers.yaml to change the local deny-list.

Detection is Presidio's job

The guardrail service asks Presidio what counts as an organization and pseudonymizes whatever comes back. Tuning what is detected happens in Presidio configuration (the Helm values above), not in the service.