Alcatraz
Pure-Go PII detection, 100x faster than MS Presidio
Details
- External ID
- 49169567
- Source
- HN
- Company
- —
- Product
- —
- Website domain
- —
- Launched
- Aug. 4, 2026
- Cohort
- —
- Upvotes
- 6
- Upvotes percentile
- 0.3125
- Tags
- —
- Fetched at
- Sept. 10, 2026, 5:32 a.m.
- Updated at
- Sept. 10, 2026, 5:32 a.m.
Description
Hi HN, I'm Andrios, founder of hoop.dev (YC W21), we build runtime controls for agents. We just released Alcatraz.We built it because our product is written in Go and we do real time Data Masking, but we were using MS Presidio (Python) for PII detection and it made connections slow.There was a good discussion here a few months ago when OpenAI released their Privacy Filter: (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47870901). A lot of questions were built into our design. Structured identifiers (credit cards, SSNs, etc) are deterministic and you can verify them with checksum. Free text PII like names and addresses is where you actually need a model.Alcatraz started as our internal solution, but we wanted to make it available for everyone: in-process PII detection in Go. Currently 45 entity types across 12 countries (US and Brazil included). Benchmarks vs MS Presidio (lib to lib) about 13x faster on dense documents, 100x on smaller ones.Still in development, lots to improve. Feedback wanted: github.com/hoophq/alcatrazEdit 1: fix typo Python written as Phyton
Enrichment
- Theme
- lightweight and on-device AI runtimes
- Vertical
- Security
- Function
- Compliance & governance
- Audience
- Developer
- AI stance
- Not AI
- Project type
- Commercial product
- Normalized one-liner
- fast PII detection engine
- Manually corrected
- False
Could you build this?
Partial A basic regex-based PII scrubber is trivial, but matching or exceeding Microsoft Presidio's detection accuracy across diverse international entities purely in high-speed Go requires optimized NER and pattern recognition engines.
What it would actually take: The implementation requires Go-native high-performance tokenizers, Aho-Corasick or Hyperscan-backed regex matchers, checksum validators (Luhn, IBAN, SSN), and lightweight ONNX/NER models embedded via Go Cgo/pure-go bindings. The difficult part is matching production-grade recall/precision across unstructured text while keeping latency under 1 millisecond without heavy Python runtimes.
Discussion
No comments on this launch.
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one — 15 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #13 of 16 (itself plus its competitors, highest first — normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 238 days after the earliest competitor.
- Local Privacy Firewall-blocks PII and secrets before ChatGPT sees them · hn · 2025-12-09 · 111 upvotes · similarity 0.35
- Privaro · ph · 2026-09-18 · 2 upvotes · similarity 0.34
- APIRadar – Open-Source API Key Scanner · ph · 2026-09-15 · 3 upvotes · similarity 0.33
- Pu.sh · hn · 2026-04-30 · 92 upvotes · similarity 0.32
- pix-golpe · github · 2026-09-22 · 25 upvotes · similarity 0.32
- HoundDog.ai · hn · 2026-02-02 · 16 upvotes · similarity 0.32
- C discrete event SIM w stackful coroutines runs 45x faster than SimPy · hn · 2026-02-03 · 69 upvotes · similarity 0.32
- A local-first, reversible PII scrubber for AI workflows · hn · 2025-12-24 · 38 upvotes · similarity 0.32
Other launches for this product
- No other launches for this product.
Same idea, different domain
Nobody's really built a compliance & governance tool for Media & entertainment yet.