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Security & Privacy

Auto Redact PDF: Find Personal Info, Free

Auto redact a PDF free: we find the emails, phone numbers, card, bank and ID numbers on every page, you untick anything that should stay, and the rest is removed — not covered. It all happens on your device.

Settings appear once you add a PDF.

Advanced 3
Keep the rest of the text searchable
Also remove the author and other metadata
Quality of redacted pages

Done on your device No upload, no queue, no sign-up.

Bytes sent anywhere: 0 B

How to auto redact a PDF free

Your PDF goes into this browser tab, is searched and redacted on your device, and comes back as a PDF with the personal data removed. 0 bytes uploaded

  1. Add your PDF

    Drop the PDF. Every page is searched for emails, phone numbers, card, SSN, IBAN, Aadhaar and PAN numbers.

  2. Check the settings

    Check the list. Untick anything that should stay, and add names or words of your own.

  3. Save the result

    Press Redact selected. Each one is removed from the file for good, and the pages you didn’t touch stay as they were.

Why it doesn’t upload

Automatic redaction means reading every word of a sensitive document. If that happens on a server, the server has read every word. Here the search and the redaction both run in your browser tab.

Check it in your browser’s Network tab

Worth knowing

  • Only text the PDF actually contains can be found. Scanned pages are pictures — make them searchable with OCR first, or draw boxes by hand.
  • Pattern matching finds most personal data but can’t understand context. Always check the list, and look through the result before sending.
  • Card, IBAN and Aadhaar numbers are checked with their check digits, so random numbers aren’t flagged.
  • Pages with redactions are rebuilt as images; the rest of their text is put back as invisible, searchable text.

Under the hood

What happens to your file

pdf.js extracts the text with positions, and pattern matching finds email addresses, phone numbers, card, SSN, IBAN, Aadhaar and PAN numbers — card, IBAN and Aadhaar numbers are checked against their check digits, so random digits are not flagged. Each hit becomes a padded rectangle you can check and change. The redaction itself is the same as Redact PDF: pages burned in, hidden data on them removed, the file rewritten by qpdf.

Runs on pdf.jspdf-libqpdf

Reference: qpdf manual

Questions

What personal information does auto redaction find?

Email addresses, phone numbers, payment card numbers, US Social Security numbers, IBANs, Indian Aadhaar and PAN numbers, passport numbers after the word “passport”, IP addresses and dates of birth — plus any words or names you type in.

Can I review what gets redacted?

Yes. Every match is listed with its page number, grouped by type, with a tick box. Nothing is removed until you press Redact selected.

Is automatic redaction reliable enough for legal documents?

It’s a fast first pass. Pattern matching can miss unusual formats or flag false positives, so treat the list as a draft, open the result, and use Redact PDF to draw boxes over anything it missed.

Does it work on scanned PDFs?

Only once they have a text layer. A scan is a picture of a page, so there’s no text to search until OCR reads it.

Read more about this

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