How To Secure Personal Data With Ebbot's Dishwasher

As a multidisciplinary employee, Ebbot is able to work in many positions, such as Customer Service or Helpdesk Digital Assistant. This means that he sometimes has to ask for your personal information to help you solve problems.

Are you wondering if it’s safe to share your information with Ebbot?

Well, you can put your mind at ease — because with Hello Ebbot’s special dishwasher, your personal data is completely secure!


How does this dishwasher work and how did we make it possible, you may ask?

Please keep reading and we’ll answer all your questions 👀

Handling numeric data

During conversations with Ebbot, there might be very sensitive and important information such as credit card numbers or personal identity numbers. And we get it — that kind of data in the wrong hands can be dangerous.

With the dishwasher, this information is censored and not saved in the database.

Compared to text data, it’s easier to sort out numeric information thanks to the help of regular expressions or regex — a technique used to detect specific patterns in a string. For example, the pattern of phone numbers can be defined like this:

phone = re.compile(r'([+]?46|0)(s)(7[0-9])(s)(d{4})(s)(d{3})')

The re.compile() method allows us to turn a pattern into a reusable object. We won’t go too deep into the technical details here — but if you’re curious, this regex cheatsheet will help you understand how Ebbot’s dishwasher scrubs the data clean!

Washing personal text data using the dishwasher

When it comes to text data, our cleaning list includes emails, names, and locations.

Emails are relatively easy to wipe using regex. But names and locations?

Those are trickier — and require a more advanced solution to detect and remove effectively.

Luckily, we can rely on a powerful and open-source pre-trained model released by the National Library of Sweden, fine-tuned for named entity recognition (NER).

In simpler terms, this model helps us automatically detect things like personal names, places, events, and organizations in a sentence — and remove them safely.

Enough talk — let’s see it in action!

Here are a few examples in our demo web app that show the dishwasher in use.

Unlike some of our other NLP experiments that are still in testing, this dishwasher is already live with one of our clients. 🥳

Want to learn more about how it works?

Book a demo and we’ll tell you everything!