Detection and labeling of personal identifiable information in E-mails

Abstract

The protection of personal identifiable information (PII) is increasingly demanded by customers and data protection regulation. To safeguard PII a organization has to find out which incoming communication actually contains it. Only then PII can be labeled, tracked, and protected. E-mails are one of the main means of communication. They consist of unstructured data difficult to classify. We developed an automated detection system for PII in e-mails and connected it to a usage control infrastructure. Our concept is based on previous findings in the area of spam detection. We tested our approach with a data set in a customer service scenario. The evaluation shows that the utilization of Bayes-classification is very promising to detect PII.