![]() ![]() Redacting a digital document is a delicate and not-so-easy task and the main challenge is hiding the sensitive information while keeping the document’s formatting. In older times, thick permanent marker pens were used to blot out the information, which is completely pointless nowadays with digital documents. In fact, redaction is something that all individuals or entities from any field or industry should know about. For example, someone might need to share an agreement with a friend just for them to use it as a template while removing compromised data. Sometimes it can just be informal situations where someone has to share certain information contained in a document without revealing the sensitive data it contains. Files on most mobile devices or cameras include the date, time, and maybe even username details related to the photo in the metadata.ĭepending on the type of business or administrative procedure, redaction might also be required by the institution, state, international legislation, etc. For example, email metadata discloses the time and date the email was sent, the sender’s IP address, etc. Other information that you might want to remove could include attachments or metadata.Images, including photographs, graphics, etc.Numbers, like telephone numbers, social security numbers, bank account numbers, etc. ![]() Text that contains sensitive information, such as names, addresses, contact details, past medical records, criminal offence data, etc.Commonly redacted information can include the following: It’s necessary to redact a PDF when the document contains confidential or sensitive information that cannot or should not be disclosed to a third party, as well as data that is protected under data protection legislation. This information can consist of text, numbers, images, graphics, or similar. It can be done by hiding or blocking out individual words, sentences, paragraphs, or even removing whole pages. If you’re not sure how to do it, get somebody more experienced to check your work – don’t just draw a rectangle and call it a day.Redacting is the process of removing visible information from a document while leaving the rest of the document intact. PDFs are fiddly, and it’s easy to have something that looks redacted but actually isn’t. Unfortunately I don’t redact PDFs very often, and I don’t know how to do it safely – looking at the layers is one way to get around redaction, but maybe there’s another I’m not aware of. I’d love to tell you how to redact PDFs a set of steps that guarantee information security. There was a difference in my PDF viewer which tipped me off to the issue, but it’s so subtle I don’t know how to explain it. The problem is, a PDF with and without layers look near identical. This means that even if somebody picks apart the document, they can’t find what you’ve removed: If you want to redact information in a PDF safely, you need to remove it from all the layers. ![]() The information wasn’t really gone, just hidden. In this case, there were two layers: an image layer with the original document, and a transparent layer with a black rectangle over the area that was meant to be redacted:Īlthough it looked as if the personal information had been removed, you could still get it by inspecting the individual layers. Imagine the layers are stacked vertically, and you’re looking down at them from above. PDF documents can be made up of multiple layers, and when you view the document those layers get flattened into a single page. ![]() The problem is that PDF is a complicated format, and getting redaction right is tricky. The person who’d sent me the documents had tried to redact the information, and to them it looked like they’d succeeded. And if I could do it, so could somebody else. I ran my script over the legal documents, and to my horror, it produced a bunch of images that should have been redacted. I found a blog post with some Python for extracting all the images from a PDF, which I adapted into my own script. I also know you can manipulate PDFs in Python, which I’ve done a couple of times before. I did download a free trial and play around, but I didn’t get anywhere useful. I know you can pull apart PDF documents with advanced PDF editors like Adobe Acrobat Pro, but I don’t know how to use any of those programs. If they were removed – would you see the redacted information? If the boxes were separate – could they be removed? As I dragged to select text, the boxes weren’t being selected. It’s hard to explain, but I got a spidey sense that the boxes were somehow separate from the rest of the document. I received the documents as a set of PDFs, and as I was reading them, something felt off about the black boxes. As part of my review, I was checking that everything was suitable to be made public.īlack boxes had been added to redact certain sections, to prevent leaking personal information like signatures and addresses: A while back I was reviewing some legal documents. ![]()
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