How to redact a PDF without uploading it
You can redact a PDF without uploading it by using a tool that runs inside your browser instead of on somebody's server. Olbo's Redactor reads the file on the machine you are sitting at, finds the personal information in it, and writes a clean copy back to your disk. Nothing is sent anywhere, there is no account, and you can check that for yourself by opening your browser's network panel while you do it.
Step by step
- Open the Redactor and drop your PDF onto it.The file is read straight off your disk. It is not uploaded, and no copy of it is made on a server, because there is no server to make one on.
- Look at what it found.Emails, phone numbers, card numbers, bank details, ID numbers, postal addresses and dates of birth are ticked when you arrive. Each match is shown where it sits on the page.
- Put back anything it got wrong.Click a box to drop it. Names are switched off to begin with, because a name has no shape to check against and the detector gets it wrong in both directions.
- Cover anything it missed.Drag on the page to draw a box yourself, or type one by number. On a scan this is the whole job, and the tool says so rather than letting you believe it found nothing.
- Download the copy.The covered text is taken out of the file rather than painted over, so it cannot be selected, copied or recovered from the copy you send on.
Why uploading matters here
A document you are redacting is, by definition, one with something in it you do not want strangers reading. Uploading it to redact it means handing the unredacted version to a company you have not met, keeping it on their disk for as long as their retention policy says, and hoping their breach is somebody else's problem.
The version of this that does not require any trust is the one where the file never leaves. You can confirm it rather than believe it: open the network panel in your browser, drop a file in, and watch nothing happen. Then turn your wifi off and keep working.
Black boxes are not redaction
Most ways of hiding text in a PDF draw a rectangle on top of it. The rectangle is a drawing, and the words are still underneath: select the area, paste it into a text editor, and there they are. People have lost court cases and jobs this way.
Olbo takes the text out of the file instead, and the status line says so while you work. What comes out the other side does not contain the words, so there is nothing left to recover.
Scans are the hard case
A scanned document is a picture of a page. There is no text in it to search, so no detector can find anything, and a tool that reports zero matches on one is telling the truth in the most misleading way available.
Olbo says out loud when a PDF has no text in it and asks you to draw the boxes yourself, and the download button stops calling the file a clean copy until you have. Anything you draw is burnt into the picture when you save.
More guides
Olbo is an office suite that runs in your browser. Your files are read on the machine you are sitting at and are never uploaded. See all six tools.