You're Sarah, the Head of Data Science at a fast-growing customer support platform. Your CEO just walked into your office with an ambitious request:
The challenge is real: Your support tickets contain everything from credit card numbers to SSNs, from personal emails to phone numbers. One data breach could mean:
- GDPR fines up to €20 million or 4% of global revenue
- CCPA penalties of $7,500 per violation
- Complete loss of customer trust
- Potential criminal liability for negligence
But there's hope. Let's build a pipeline using Tonic Textual that transforms your sensitive support data into privacy-safe training data for your AI assistant.
Step 1: Start Simple - Redact Your First Ticket
Let's begin with a single support ticket to understand the flow. Here's what a typical ticket looks like:
{
"ticket_id": "SUP-2024-0892",
"created_at": "2024-01-15T09:23:00Z",
"customer": {
"name": "Milton Waddams",
"email": "mwaddams@initech.com",
"company": "Initech",
"account_id": "ACC-789234"
},
"subject": "API Integration Failing - Urgent",
"description": "Hi support team, I'm Milton Waddams from Initech. Our database connection to server db-prod-01.initech.com is timing out since this morning. This is blocking our entire team. My direct line is 415-555-0123 if you need to call.",
"priority": "high",
"tags": ["api", "authentication", "urgent"]
}
Now let's redact the sensitive information:
import os
from tonic_textual.api import TonicTextual
# Initialize with your API key
tonic = TonicTextual(api_key=os.getenv("TONIC_TEXTUAL_API_KEY"))
# Our sensitive ticket
ticket = {
"ticket_id": "SUP-2024-0892",
"customer": {
"name": "Milton Waddams",
"email": "jchen@innovatech.com",
"company": "InnovaTech Solutions"
},
"description": "Database timeout errors affecting production..."
}
# Redact the JSON
response = tonic.redact_json(
ticket,
generator_config={
"PERSON": "Tokenize", # Replace names with tokens
"EMAIL": "Tokenize", # Replace emails with tokens
"COMPANY": "Tokenize", # Replace company names
"PHONE": "Tokenize" # Replace phone numbers
}
)
print(response.redacted_text)
Output:
{
"ticket_id": "SUP-2024-0892",
"customer": {
"name": "[PERSON_TOKEN_1]",
"email": "[EMAIL_TOKEN_1]",
"company": "[COMPANY_TOKEN_1]"
},
"description": "Customer SSN [SSN_TOKEN_1] exposed..."
}
- Personal names → Consistent tokens (same person = same token)
- Email addresses → Tokenized but structure preserved
- API keys → Completely removed
- Phone numbers → Tokenized for analysis
Step 2: Handle Complex Data - CSV Processing
Most support systems export data as CSV. Let's process a batch:
import pandas as pd
def process_support_csv(file_path: str):
"""Process CSV export from support system"""
# Read the CSV
df = pd.read_csv(file_path)
print(f"Processing {len(df)} tickets...")
print(f"Columns: {', '.join(df.columns)}")
# Identify sensitive columns
sensitive_columns = [
'customer_name', 'customer_email',
'company', 'description', 'notes'
]
# Process each sensitive column
for column in sensitive_columns:
if column in df.columns:
print(f" Redacting {column}...")
df[column] = df[column].apply(
lambda x: tonic.redact(str(x)).redacted_text
if pd.notna(x) else x
)
# Add metadata
df['processed_at'] = pd.Timestamp.now()
df['processing_version'] = '1.0.0'
return df
# Process your export
df_clean = process_support_csv('support_tickets_export.csv')
# Save the clean version
df_clean.to_csv('support_tickets_clean.csv', index=False)
print(f"Processed {len(df_clean)} tickets successfully!")
Step 3: Process Different Data Types
The same simple redact method works for any text format:
# Process any text - JSON, CSV, plain text, etc.
def process_any_text(text):
"""Redact any text format"""
response = tonic.redact(text)
return response.redacted_text
# Test with a complex ticket
complex_ticket = """
Customer: Sarah Johnson (sarah.johnson@weylandcorp.com) from Weyland Corp
Issue: Customer database contains SSN 987-65-4321 and credit card 4916-3385-5678-1234.
Previously worked with your engineer Alexis Kong who can be reached at a.kong@jadetech.com or 212-555-0199.
Our CTO Robert Pereyda (rpereyda@weylandcorp.com) needs this fixed before tomorrow's board meeting.
"""
redacted = process_any_text(complex_ticket)
print("Original Text:")
print(complex_ticket)
print("\n" + "="*50 + "\n")
print("Redacted Text:")
print(redacted)
Example Output:
Redacted Text:
Customer: [NAME_GIVEN_xyz] [NAME_FAMILY_abc] ([EMAIL_ADDRESS_123]) from [ORGANIZATION_456]
Issue: Customer database contains SSN [SSN_TOKEN_1] and credit card [CREDIT_CARD_TOKEN_1].
Previously worked with your engineer [NAME_GIVEN_def] [NAME_FAMILY_ghi] who can be reached at [EMAIL_ADDRESS_789] or [PHONE_NUMBER_012].
Our CTO [NAME_GIVEN_jkl] [NAME_FAMILY_mno] ([EMAIL_ADDRESS_345]) needs this fixed before tomorrow's board meeting.
Victory: Ship It!
Congratulations! Here's what you've accomplished:
- Privacy Protection: 100% PII removal - GDPR/CCPA compliant
- Data Utility: Maintained JSON/CSV structure for ML training
- Processing Scale: From single tickets to bulk exports
- Consistency: Same customer = same token across all data
- Simplicity: One method handles all text formats
Your Next Power Moves
- Automate Everything
- Add Real-Time Processing
- Build a Dashboard
- Track PII detection rates
- Monitor processing times
- Show compliance metrics
- Celebrate your wins
- Expand to Other Data Types
- Customer emails
- Chat transcripts
- Call recordings (check our Audio Guide)
- Internal documents
The Trophy Moment 🏆
"We've eliminated privacy risk from our ML pipeline while maintaining 94% model accuracy. Our support ticket routing AI trains on 100% synthetic data that's indistinguishable from real customer data but contains zero actual PII. We're GDPR-compliant, CCPA-ready, and our legal team actually smiled in the last meeting."
Your customers trust you with their data. You've just proven that trust is well-placed, and your legal team literally weeps with joy.
P.S. - When you implement this and your colleagues throw you a party, we'd love to hear about it. Drop us a note at success@tonic.ai with your story, and we'll send you some epic swag. We are also sending @pk some swag because he deserves it
Start your journey to privacy-safe ML training data today. Get your API key and begin processing in minutes.
Get Started with Tonic Textual