medium.com• Dec 24, 2025• 1 min read
Show HN: A local-first, reversible PII scrubber for AI workflowsHi HN,I’m one of the maintainers of Bridge Anonymization. We built this because the existing solutions for translating sensitive user content are insufficient for many of our privacy-concious clients (Governments, Banks, Healthcare, etc.).We couldn't send PII to third-party APIs, but standard redaction destroyed the translation quality. If you scrub "John" to "[PERSON]", the translation engine loses gender context (often defaulting to masculine), which breaks grammatical agreement in languages like French or German.So we built a reversible, local-first pipeline for Node.js/Bun. Here is how we implemented the tricky parts:0. The MappingWe use XML-like tags with ID’s that uniquely identify the PII, ``. Translation models and the systems around them work with XML data structures since the dawn of Computer Aided Translation tools, so this improves compatibility with existing workflows and systems. A `PIIMap` is stored locally for rehydration after translation (AES-256-GCM-encrypted by defa
