The redaction mistake everyone makes
You draw a black rectangle over the sensitive text in your PDF editor, save, and send. You're done, right? Wrong. The text is still there — under the rectangle. Anyone who opens the file in a text extractor, or even just selects the area and hits Ctrl+C, can read every word. This has burned people in court filings, FOIA releases, and corporate document dumps.
True redaction removes the underlying text from the PDF's content stream. The black box is just the visual indicator. There's nothing underneath to extract.
PrivacyScanPDF does true redaction: the characters are physically removed from the file. Not covered. Not hidden. Gone.
How to redact a PDF
Three steps:
- 1Open the Redact PDF tool and load your PDF.
- 2Select what to redact — highlight text ranges, or draw rectangles over regions (works on images too).
- 3Hit 'Redact'. The underlying text is permanently removed from the content stream. A redacted copy downloads immediately, processed locally.
What to redact (and what to leave)
Common targets: names, addresses, phone numbers, email addresses, SSNs, bank account numbers, dates of birth, signatures. Anything that identifies a person.
For partial redaction (showing only the last 4 of an SSN, for example), use the 'partial text' option — PrivacyScanPDF will redact only the characters you specify within a text run.
Don't forget metadata. A redacted PDF can still leak the author, software, and creation date. Run the Remove Metadata tool after redaction for full sanitization.
Why redaction must be private
If you're redacting a PDF, the unredacted version contains information that could ruin someone — a source, a patient, a witness, a client. Uploading that unredacted PDF to a server-based 'redaction tool' to 'protect' it is the worst possible move. Your most sensitive document is now on a third-party server, in plaintext, waiting to be processed.
PrivacyScanPDF redacts entirely in your browser. The original text is removed from the content stream before the file is ever written to disk on your machine. No upload, no server logs, no third-party access — ever. For legal, government, or healthcare redactions, this is the only acceptable architecture.