Redact a Document
Black out personal data in a screenshot, photo or scanned PDF. The covered pixels are replaced, not hidden — and the file never leaves your device.
Black out personal data
Reads the text in a screenshot, photo or scan, finds things like email addresses and card numbers, and covers them. Check what it found before you apply it — the covered pixels are replaced, so the result cannot be un-redacted.
Covering is not the same as removing
The most common way to redact a document is to draw a black rectangle over the sensitive part and save it. In a PDF that does almost nothing: the rectangle is one object and the text is another, still there in the file, still selectable, still searchable. Courts, government departments and newspapers have all published documents redacted this way and had the text pulled back out within minutes of release.
This tool takes the slower route on purpose. Each page is rendered to an image, the boxes are painted into that image, and the file you download is built from the painted pixels. There is no layer to peel back, because the original was never copied into the output.
The trade-off is that a PDF comes back flattened — page images rather than selectable text. For a scan or a screenshot that costs nothing, since there was no text layer to start with. For a born-digital document it is a real loss, and worth knowing before you start.
Detection is a starting point, not the finish. It reads what it can and matches known shapes; names, addresses, handwriting and anything the recognition misread will not be found. That is why nothing is applied until you have looked at it, and why you can draw over anything yourself.