Introducing Redactable - Redaction software that really works

 

Employees of law firms, legal departments, financial institutions, healthcare organizations, and the public sector often need to collaborate internally on documents that will be sent to outside parties, such as clients, and other companies. To avoid disseminating confidential data and others' personal information, it's necessary to properly redact PDFs and other file types to ensure that sensitive data does not land in unwanted hands.

‍

Permanent redaction is important - and if performed incorrectly can lead to a leak of confidential information and consequences such as fines, lawsuits, scandals, and loss of customer trust. To avoid the mess that can be created by failed redactions, you need to ensure that your documents are redacted permanently and that the redaction software you are using really works.

‍

Of course, professionals tasked with redaction are doing their best with the tools at their disposal. However, many of the common practices for redaction are leaving organizations vulnerable.

Where redaction goes wrong

‍

Today’s common processes for redacting documents are more difficult than they should be, lacking easy-to-use functionality and efficiency. To compensate, companies use costly or time-consuming workarounds that still fail to permanently redact sensitive data. Here are some of the most common practices for document redaction and how they fall short: 

‍

The black sharpie approach

One of the most painstaking redaction methods still used today involves printing out all of the pages, manually blacking out the sensitive data with a marker, and scanning the documents back into the computer. 

‍

This approach is very time-consuming and is vulnerable to human error as the person redacting the document must identify sensitive information manually. Also, redacted information isn’t always hidden, as scanners can pick up the "bleed-through" of the black marker on a document, and your sensitive information can be seen in the scanned version.

‍

"Hide and Seek" redaction

Another common mistake is when organizations release (what they think are) redacted documents to the public, covering the sensitive information with a black box or changing font colors to make text unreadable,  as you can do in Microsoft Word. 

‍

Once they have changed the color of the words to black, they believe the document has been successfully redacted, however, the hidden content can be easily uncovered by copying and pasting that piece of text to reveal it. 

‍

Missed metadata 

In some cases, the text in a document may be properly redacted, but the document's metadata stores previous versions and hidden document elements without users' knowledge. These versions will contain previously edited content and may be disclosed by a savvy PDF user.

Originally Published as Introducing Redactable - Redaction software that really works on Redactable Blog