Not all of life’s surprises are bad. Walking into a room full of friends and family yelling “surprise!” on your birthday is exciting. Learning you’re going to inherit millions from a long-lost aunt who you’ve never met is positive. Finding out that the highly sensitive information you thought was redacted wasn’t and is now everywhere, however, is not ideal. Proper redaction ensures the content is completely burned from the document so it cannot be uncovered.

Don’t be surprised by how straightforward proper redaction is

You wouldn’t try to drill a hole with an electric toothbrush because things don’t end well when you use the wrong tool for the job. Major redaction errors in recent times have exposed national security secrets, business deals, and everything in between. In almost all instances the errors happened because the right tool wasn’t used for the job. Instead of redacting with a PDF redaction tool, the text was only masked.

Masking happens when sensitive information is covered up with black boxes, or font color is changed to match the background color, and the document is converted to PDF. But, by simply copying the text to a Word document, the contents beneath the masking can easily be uncovered.

A PDF redaction tool is the only true way to remove information from a document so it can’t be exposed. Once redactions are applied, they are burned into the document, so there is no way for the original text to be retrieved. Plus, these PDF redaction solutions offer time-saving workflows like pattern search and redaction to locate strings of text or numbers, as well as review and approval workflows. Minimize the time it takes to redact with confidence. Always use the right tool for the job.