See image below for an example of what I mean. Instead of just redacting the social security number for example, you also lose nearby content that could be above, below, left, and right of what you were targeting. Some tools can redact just fine, but they are what I call too ‘loose’. Use a tool that has a clean redaction.A good PDF redaction tool will clean up all those, and more, during sanitization. Search indexes and review comments are also good hiding spots for sensitive data. Previous versions of documents can contain information we thought is redacted, making it readily available. As I mentioned before, the document’s metadata can contain sensitive information. Make sure the document is sanitized after the redaction.Such tools are more common than you would think, so let me give you some pointers on redaction: But, what if we use a tool that claims to redact a document, but does a poor job? How do you know? You want to use a tool that is designed for proper redaction. Furthermore, this text can be searched for, and changing the font color back to a visible one is easy. Simply selecting all the text on a page will reveal all the “hidden” text. This is perhaps the least secure of all the incorrect redaction methods available. The idea is that if you can’t see the text, it’s not there. Properly redacting a document will take care of all of those issues.Īnother common mistake while attempting to redact a document is to change the font color of sensitive information to simply match the background. Metadata can also contain previously deleted content, or references to it. Those versions will contain previously deleted content. A lot of tools keep versions of a document without us ever realizing that. What if we decide to manually select and delete the content, and then manually add a black box over it? Aside from this being a laborious process, there are some major downsides to it. We focus on the optional black box that goes over the content, and don’t realize the content is still readily available in the document. The most common example of incorrectly redacted documents is the one that I started the article with. An additional step is to sanitize the document, cleaning up sneaky data like metadata, bookmarks, links, and anything that could have content in it that you do not want availableĪs you can see, if those steps are not followed properly, many things can go wrong, and you might end up distributing documents that still contain sensitive information.The redaction annotations are reviewed and applied, permanently removing the content.
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