Introduction

pii is library for wrapping Personally Identifying Information and providing ways to limit its spread.

Installation

Yarn

yarn add @tdreyno/pii

NPM

npm install --save @tdreyno/pii

Usage

The concept is simple. Wrap PII around any PII data as soon as it enters your system.

import { PII, unwrapObject } from "@tdreyno/pii"

const handlePost = (postBody: { name: string; phoneNumber: string }) =>
  createUser(PII(postBody.name), PII(postBody.phoneNumber))

const createUser = (name: PII<string>, phoneNumber: PII<string>) =>
  sendToThirdParty(unwrapObject({ name, phoneNumber }))

PII wraps any data and obscures the details. Attempts to coerce it to other types or convert to JSON will result in a string result of PII<REDACTED>. Once the PII has flowed through your system, use unwrap to get the data back out for posting to a third party. Or unwrapObject which will recursively unwrap PII inside a post body object.

Avoiding unsafe unwrapping and rewrapping

If you want to combine two pieces of PII, such as first and last name, you might want to unwrap, combine and then rewrap them. Once you start using unwrap everywhere, it becomes very hard to maintain safetly. Rather, use the built in methods of this library to mutate and combine PII while keeping the data inside the wrapper.

Modify PII

import { PII, map } from "@tdreyno/pii"

const name = PII("Thomas")
const lowercaseName = map(n => n.toLowerCase(), name) // PII<"thomas">

Combine two things

import { PII, zip2With } from "@tdreyno/pii"

const firstName = PII("Thomas")
const lastName = PII("Reynolds")
const fullName = zip2With(
  (first, last) => `${first} ${last}`,
  firstName,
  lastName,
) // PII<Thomas Reynolds>

Note: There are methods for up to 4 PII inputs: zip2With, zip3With, zip4With.

Reduce a list of PII

import { PII, fold } from "@tdreyno/pii"

const address1 = PII(ADDRESS_OBJECT_1)
const address2 = PII(ADDRESS_OBJECT_2)
const address2 = PII(ADDRESS_OBJECT_2)

const allAddresses = fold(
  (acc, address) => (acc.push(address), acc),
  [],
  [address1, address2, address3],
) // PII<[address1, address2, address3]>

Inspect or create side-effects using PII contents without unwrapping

import { PII, tap } from "@tdreyno/pii"

const name = PII("Thomas")
const lowercaseName = tap(n => console.log(n), name) // Logs "Thomas"

Detecting PII in Data

Recurses through a data structure and uses a callback to detect values that should become PII.

import { PII, detect } from "@tdreyno/pii"

const person = { name: "Thomas" }
const lowercaseName = detect(
  data => isObject(person) && Object.keys().some(k => k.includes(name)),
  person,
) // Returns PII({ name: "Thomas" })

Custom PII Redaction

import { PII, redact } from "@tdreyno/pii"

const name = PII("Thomas")
const lowercaseName = redact(() => "REDACTED", name) // Returns "REDACTED"

License

pii is licensed under the Hippocratic License. It is an Ethical Source license derived from the MIT License, amended to limit the impact of the unethical use of open source software.