RedactProof

They copied the SSN straight out of your redacted PDF.

In most editors a redaction is a rectangle drawn on top. The words are still in the file, and whoever you send it to can select them, copy them, or search for them. RedactProof takes them out, then refuses to give you the file until it has checked they are gone.

Free for your first 3 files. Start with three you have already sent.

A box drawn on top

Claimant: Maria Delgado
SSN: 078-05-1120
Policy: HX-4471-B
What they get by pressing Ctrl+A, Ctrl+C Claimant: Maria Delgado
SSN: 078-05-1120

RedactProof

Claimant:
SSN:
Policy: HX-4471-B
What they get by pressing Ctrl+A, Ctrl+C 0 extractable text objects.
Checked before the download was allowed.

Open a PDF and see what is in it

Nothing is uploaded. The file is opened, read and rewritten inside this tab, on your computer. Turn off your internet connection first and it still works.

Your PDF stays on this machine. There is no server to send it to.

Waiting for a file.

You have already sent some

Think about the last file you sent out with something blacked out. A settlement. A claim file. An HR complaint. A court exhibit.

Do you know which tool drew that box? Do you know whether the name is still sitting under it right now, on somebody else's hard drive, one keyboard shortcut away?

You can't unsend it. If the text is still in there, you'll find out when somebody quotes it back to you, and by then it has been read, saved and forwarded. That's the part worth worrying about. Not the document you're about to send. The ones already gone.

Draw a box in most PDF editors and all you've added is a shape on top. The characters underneath are untouched. They survive copy and paste, they survive a text search, they survive being opened in a different program. The page looks finished, which is exactly why nobody ever checks it twice.

About fifteen seconds, and it costs nothing. Nothing is uploaded, so you can do it with a document you would never put on somebody else's server.

The tool listing three checksum-validated findings recovered from a scanned page: a US
        Social Security number, a payment card number and a bank routing number, each with a
        tickbox and the page it was found on.
A real run, on a scanned page with no text in it at all. Every finding here was read off the pixels in the browser, then checked by arithmetic: the card passes Luhn, the routing number passes the ABA checksum.

It removes, then re-reads

Every page is flattened to pixels, so there is no text layer left to recover. Then the output is opened again and searched for text objects.

It refuses to hand you a bad file

If a single extractable character survives, the download does not appear and it tells you why. A tool that hands you a file it hasn't checked is the problem, not the fix.

And this is what comes out

The redacted output: the Social Security number, card number and routing number are
        covered by solid black bars, while the policy number and adjuster notes are left readable.
Not a rectangle over the words. The words are gone. Select all and copy on this file and you get nothing back, because there is nothing left to copy. The policy number and the notes are untouched, because you did not ask for those.

The document never leaves your computer

This isn't a promise about our data handling. There's no upload to handle.

Most online redaction tools ask you to send them the file. Think about what that means for the document you're redacting: you're handing a stranger's server the exact file that's too sensitive to send to the other side unedited. For anyone holding client, patient or employee records, that upload can be the disclosure all by itself.

RedactProof has no server. The PDF is opened by your browser, changed by your browser, and saved by your browser. Open the Network tab and watch it stay empty. Turn off your wifi and it still works.

It tells you how sure it is

Every finding is graded by how it was checked, not by how confident it wants to sound.

  • Checksum-validated means the number passed its own maths. Card numbers (Luhn), bank routing numbers, IBANs, VINs and real calendar dates.
  • Pattern-matched means it has the right shape and nothing more. Emails, phone numbers, IPs.
  • Needs your eyes means it's a guess worth looking at. Names, addresses, long runs of digits.

An earlier version of this page called four of those categories "checksum-validated" when they had no checksum at all. That was fixed by splitting the claim into what is actually true, and it's the reason the three numbers above are shown separately instead of as one score.

What it will not do

It reads scanned pages too

A scan has no text in it, so most tools find nothing and hand you a clean-looking result over an unredacted page. This one reads the page instead, here in your browser. If a page defeats even that, it refuses to redact rather than pretend.

It does not check the boxes landed right

It proves the text is gone. It cannot prove a box covered the words you meant. That's why the preview is there, and why you should look at it.

It is not a certification

It's a tool, not legal advice and not a compliance sign-off. What it checked is written down, so you can decide what that's worth.

It works on your machine, so it works offline

Turn off your wifi and redact anyway. The same design that keeps your document off the internet means nothing here depends on us being up.

One document going out wrong costs more than this

You already know what a misdirected file means. The phone calls. The notification letters. Explaining to the person whose number it was how it left your office.

$49, once. Not a subscription, because you should not have to think about this tool again after today. Less than the first hour you would spend on the phone if you get it wrong.

One price
$49
once, and it is yours
Unlock it

Both remove the file limit. Nothing else changes, because there's nothing else to unlock. The free version is the whole tool. Your key is emailed within a few minutes.

Have a licence key?

Because everything runs on your machine, our cost of serving you is close to nothing, and the price reflects that rather than a per-page meter.