Anonymization

Caplena allows you to automatically remove personal identifiable information (PII) from all text comments, helping you stay compliant with privacy regulations and safely share or analyze sensitive data.

How to Enable Anonymization

You can enable anonymization when creating a new project:

Click New Project
In the upload flow, you’ll see the Anonymization step
Toggle it on to activate anonymization

Choose What to Anonymize

After toggling anonymization on, a settings panel will appear where you can choose the types of information you want to anonymize:

Email addresses
Phone numbers
Usernames
And more

Simply check the relevant boxes.

Want more control? Click Advanced Settings to:

Include extra PII types (e.g. ZIP Code, Religion, Gender)
Add custom sensitive data fields
Tailor anonymization to industry-specific compliance

✅ Allow-list vs. ⛔ Block-list

You can further refine anonymization behavior using:

Allow-list – Words that should not be anonymized (e.g., "John Doe")
Block-list – Words that must always be anonymized, even if they aren’t names (e.g., "very curious")

How to use:

Click “Add term”
Paste in a list from Excel
Matching is case-insensitive and based on whole words only

How It Works

Case insensitive – “Smith” and “smith” are treated the same.
Exact matches only – Only full matches will be considered.
Whole word match – A match must be a complete word or phrase, not part of a longer one.

✅ Allow-list examples:

Names or terms that should NOT be anonymized.

Smith
John Doe

⛔ Block-list examples:

Words or phrases that should always be anonymized, even if they are not names.

is
very curious

Words or phrases that should always be anonymized, even if they are not names.

Once you've selected the settings that match your needs, click Continue to move forward with your data import or processing.

Note that the anonymization process cannot be undone as only the anonymized data is stored on Caplena.

The anonymization process takes place right after the upload onto the Caplena server. The original data - the data that includes the PII information – will not be visible at any time. For technical reasons, the original data that includes the PII information will remain on the Caplena server for a short period of time, before it will be automatically and permanently deleted from the server and its backup system.

Anonymization Tips

Address vs. Location:

Address refers to structured location formats: street name, house number, ZIP/postcode, and city (e.g., “25 Oxford Street, London W1D 2LF” or “742 Evergreen Terrace, Springfield, IL 62704”)

Location captures general geographic mentions or landmarks (e.g., “Central Park”, “the Lake District”, “Northern California”)

Address vs. Street/City/ZIP/Postcode

If you anonymize too much, you’ll need to reupload the data in a new project
If anything goes wrong, reach out to us — we’re happy to help and will reimburse credits if needed

Anonymization and Translations

Caplena applies anonymization before translation, meaning that if the source text is anonymized, the translated version will also be anonymized.

⚠️ Please note:

Not all languages are currently supported for anonymization. Texts in unsupported languages may not be anonymized or only partially anonymized.

Below is the list of languages that currently support anonymization:

Language	ISO Code
Afrikaans	af
Arabic	ar
Bambara	bm
Belarusian	be
Bengali	bn
Bulgarian	bg
Burmese	my
Cantonese (Traditional)	zh-TW
Catalan	ca
Croatian	hr
Czech	cs
Danish	da
Dutch	nl
English	en
Estonian	et
Finnish	fi
French	fr
Georgian	ka
German	de
Greek	el
Hebrew	he
Hindi	hi
Hungarian	hu
Icelandic	is
Indonesian	id
Italian	it
Japanese	ja
Khmer	km
Korean	ko
Latvian	lv
Lithuanian	lt
Luxembourgish	lb
Malay	ms
Mandarin (Simplified)	zh-CN
Moldovan	ro
Norwegian (Bokmål)	nb
Persian (Farsi)	fa
Polish	pl
Portuguese	pt
Punjabi	pa
Romanian	ro
Russian	ru
Slovak	sk
Slovenian	sl
Spanish	es
Swahili	sw
Swedish	sv
Tagalog	tl
Tamil	ta
Thai	th
Turkish	tr
Ukrainian	uk
Vietnamese	vi