Glossary
Sensitive Information Type
A Microsoft Purview pattern definition for detecting specific kinds of sensitive content like credit cards or SSNs.
A sensitive information type (SIT) in Microsoft Purview is a pattern definition that detects specific kinds of sensitive content — credit-card numbers, government identification numbers, bank account numbers, IP addresses, custom internal identifiers. Microsoft ships hundreds of built-in SITs covering regulated data globally; custom SITs let you define your own. SITs combine regular expressions, keyword lists, functional checksums (like Luhn for credit cards), and contextual evidence scoring. Exact Data Match (EDM) SITs match against hashed copies of known-real data for high-precision detection. SITs are the building blocks for DLP policies, sensitivity-label auto-application, retention auto-application, and Insider Risk patterns.