> ## Documentation Index
> Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://docs.getcollate.io/llms.txt
> Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further.

# Auto PII Tagging

> Learn how to automatically identify and tag PII data with Collate's auto-classification feature. Step-by-step guide for data governance teams.

# Auto PII Tagging

Auto PII tagging for Sensitive/NonSensitive at the column level is performed based on the two approaches described below.

<Tip>
  PII Tagging is only available during `Profiler Ingestion`.
</Tip>

## Tagging logic

1. **Column Name Scanner**: We validate the column names of the table against a set of regex rules that help us identify
   common English patterns to identify email addresses, SSN, bank accounts, etc.
2. **Entity Recognition**: If the sample data ingestion is enabled, we'll validate the sample rows against an Entity
   Recognition engine that will bring up any sensitive information from a list of [supported entities](https://microsoft.github.io/presidio/supported_entities/).
   In that case, the `confidence` parameter lets you tune the minimum score required to tag a column as `PII.Sensitive`.

Note that if a column is already tagged as `PII`, we will ignore its execution.

## Troubleshooting

### SSL: CERTIFICATE\_VERIFY\_FAILED

If you see an error similar to:

```
Unexpected error while processing sample data for auto pii tagging - HTTPSConnectionPool(host='raw.githubusercontent.com', port=443):
Max retries exceeded with url: /explosion/spacy-models/master/compatibility.json
(Caused by SSLError(SSLCertVerificationError(1, '[SSL: CERTIFICATE_VERIFY_FAILED] certificate verify failed: unable to
get local issuer certificate (_ssl.c:1129)')))
```

This is a scenario that we identified on some corporate Windows laptops. The bottom-line here is that the profiler
is trying to download the Entity Recognition model but having certificate issues when trying the request.

A solution here is to manually download the model on the ingestion container / Airflow host by running:

```
pip --trusted-host github.com --trusted-host objects.githubusercontent.com install https://github.com/explosion/spacy-models/releases/download/en_core_web_md-3.5.0/en_core_web_md-3.5.0.tar.gz
```

If using Docker, you might want to customize the `Collate-ingestion` image to have this command run there by default.