Permanently remove sensitive text from your PDF
Permanently remove sensitive information from a PDF. Not covered, not hidden behind a black rectangle — removed, so it cannot be recovered by selecting, copying, or extracting the text. Free, runs in your browser, and the rest of the document is left untouched.
This is the single most important thing to understand about redaction, and getting it wrong has embarrassed governments, law firms, and major corporations in public.
When you draw a black rectangle over text in a PDF editor, you add a graphic on top of the page. The text underneath is completely untouched. It is still in the file, still selectable, still searchable, still extractable. Anyone can drag their cursor across the black box, copy, and paste the supposedly hidden words into a text editor. Copying the file into another program often strips the rectangle away entirely and reveals everything.
There have been repeated real-world incidents of exactly this — court filings, published reports, and released documents where the covered names were recoverable in seconds by anyone who thought to try. The problem is not that the people involved were careless; it is that the visual result looks convincingly like the information is gone.
Genuine redaction deletes the underlying content rather than obscuring it. After redaction there is no text beneath the marked area, because the text is not in the file any more. Selecting the region yields nothing. Searching for the removed term finds nothing. Extracting the text programmatically returns nothing, because there is nothing to return.
This is the standard that legal disclosure, freedom of information responses, and data protection compliance all require, and it is the only approach that actually protects the information.
Direct identifiers — full names, home addresses, phone numbers, email addresses, and signatures.
Official numbers — national insurance or social security numbers, passport and licence numbers, tax references, and account or card numbers.
Personal details — dates of birth, medical information, and anything else about an individual that they did not consent to being published.
Commercial information — pricing, margins, supplier terms, and internal financial detail in documents going to outside parties.
Be alert to indirect identification as well. A person's name may be removed while their exact job title, department, and start date remain, which in a small organisation identifies them just as clearly. Redaction requires thinking about what the remaining text still reveals in combination.
Legal teams preparing documents for disclosure or public filing. Public bodies responding to information requests where third-party details must be removed. HR departments sharing case documents with personal identifiers stripped out. Researchers anonymising source material before publication. Businesses removing commercial terms from contracts being used as templates or examples.
Upload your PDF by dragging it onto the box or clicking to browse. Mark the areas containing information to be removed. Process the document and download the redacted version. Work through methodically rather than quickly — the cost of missing something is much higher than the cost of taking an extra few minutes.
Open the redacted file and check it properly before it goes anywhere. Try to select text in the areas you redacted — nothing should highlight. Use the search function to look for a name or number you expected to remove — it should find nothing. Copy a whole page into a text editor and read what comes out.
This verification takes a couple of minutes and is the step that separates a redaction that works from one that merely looks like it does. For anything being published or filed with a court, it is not optional.
Redaction handles what is on the page. It does not touch the document's properties, where the original author's name, their organisation, the software used, and the full creation and revision history are frequently recorded. These fields have exposed information in high-profile cases where the page content was redacted perfectly. Run the file through PDF Metadata to clear them as well.
Your document is processed in memory and discarded the instant your download completes. Nothing is written to disk, nothing is logged, and no copy is retained — which is particularly relevant given the nature of the material people bring to this tool.