This document establishes basic principles and a methodology to recognize personal data written in free text, in different languages (whether agglutinating, inflectional or isolating) and countries.

This document is applicable to protecting human data circulating in national and international industries, and private and public organizations.

This document is applicable to processing by human beings and/or automated processing, and to various domains (e.g. law, finance, health).

It does not apply to automated image processing.

This document uses formal methods only, as statistical methods are very different in nature.