Definition
PII masking in RAG is the discipline of redacting personally identifiable information from document chunks before they are embedded, so vector retrieval itself cannot leak sensitive data back to an LLM or user.
In Depth
The common RAG mistake is to embed raw content and plan to scrub later. If PII lives in the embeddings, retrieval becomes the leak surface — a similarity query returns the sensitive chunk and the LLM is then asked to answer from it. The correct pattern is mask first, then chunk, then embed. Banking, health, and compliance-heavy domains also layer metadata filters (region, product line, freshness) to avoid routing queries to stale or disallowed documents. When Scavio is the ingestion source, masking happens between the Scavio fetch and the embed step, before the chunk ever touches the vector store.
Example Usage
The banking team added a PII masking in RAG step between Scavio ingestion and Pinecone upsert, redacting names and account identifiers before any chunk was embedded.
Platforms
PII Masking in RAG is relevant across the following platforms, all accessible through Scavio's unified API:
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