Racial or Ethnic Origin

Detects references to racial or ethnic origin disclosure: racial/ethnic origin fields, ethnicity demographic fields, and racial/ethnic identity statements. GDPR Article 9 lists racial or ethnic origin as a special category of personal data with no fixed format — it is detectable only by topic vocabulary. Topic-grade detector, low confidence by design.

Type

keyword_list

Engine

universal

Confidence

low

Confidence justification

Low by design. Racial or ethnic origin is a GDPR Article 9 special category with no fixed format, so it is detected purely by topic vocabulary. The bare word "origin" appears constantly in unrelated contexts (country of origin on customs/shipping forms, "original" documents); the regex is scoped to full disclosure phrases only, and hits should be paired with corroborative keywords (race, ethnicity, ancestry) to raise precision.

Jurisdictions

global, eu

Regulations

GDPR

Frameworks

ISO 27001, NIST CSF, SOC 2

Data categories

pii

Scope

broad

Risk rating

7

Pattern

(?i)\b(?:racial\s+origin|ethnic\s+origin|race\s+and\s+ethnicity|ethnic\s+background|ethnicity\s+demographic\s+field|racial\s+identity|ethnic\s+identity|race\/ethnicity\s+data\s+field)\b

Corroborative evidence keywords

race, ethnicity, ethnic, ancestry, heritage, diversity survey

Proximity: 300 characters

Should match

• The diversity survey asks employees to record ethnic origin voluntarily. — Ethnic origin phrase present
• Profile field captures racial identity alongside other equity data. — Racial identity phrase present
• The intake form lists ethnic background under demographic information. — Ethnic background phrase present

Should not match

• Country of origin: Australia, per the customs declaration. — Near-miss ("origin" alone, "country of origin"), no racial/ethnic origin disclosure
• The original document was notarized by a public official. — Unrelated root-word near-miss ("original" vs "origin")
• The restaurant offers a variety of ethnic cuisines. — Topical mention ("ethnic" alone), no personal disclosure phrase

Known false positives

• The bare word "origin" appears in unrelated contexts (country of origin on customs/shipping documents, "original" documents) that have nothing to do with racial or ethnic origin. Mitigation: The regex targets full disclosure phrases ("racial origin", "ethnic origin", "racial identity") rather than the bare word "origin"; require corroborative keywords (race, ethnicity, ancestry, heritage) for confidence.

References

• GDPR Article 9 — processing of special categories of personal data (racial or ethnic origin)