Finds ID numbers, card numbers, email addresses and phone numbers, and deletes that text from the file before drawing a black box — not just a rectangle laid on top.
Pick the categories, and add your own keywords if you need to.
Open the result and try to select the black area — you should not be able to.
This one needs an upload, and is deleted afterwards
Browsers cannot do this calculation, so the file goes to our server. It is deleted automatically 60 minutes after the job finishes, and the working copy lives in a memory filesystem that is wiped whenever the server restarts.
We do not log file names and do not log file contents — that is a hard rule in our engineering standards, not a setting.
What it does — and what it doesn't
Reference numbers with no fixed format cannot be detected — medical record numbers, case numbers, employee IDs. There is no national format for them, and claiming otherwise would be guesswork. Supply those as keywords; everything from the keyword to the end of the line is removed.
ID numbers are checksum-verified and card numbers are Luhn-verified, so lookalikes are not destroyed by mistake.
A scan has no text layer, so nothing is found. You are told to run OCR first, rather than handed an empty result that looks like a clean bill.
Text inside images is not touched — OCR first, or draw the boxes yourself with Redact.
Common questions
How is this different from drawing a black rectangle?
A rectangle only covers. The text is still in the file, and copy-paste brings the whole number back — that leak is common.
How do I confirm it worked?
Open the result and try to select the black area with the mouse. If nothing can be selected or copied, it is gone.
Could it redact something it should not?
Numbers are checksum-verified, so false positives are rare. But always read the result — no automatic detector should be the last line of defence.
