Redacting by hand across two hundred pages is where mistakes happen: one missed occurrence of an email address undoes the whole exercise. This finds them by pattern instead — emails, phone numbers, payment cards checked against their own checksum, national identifiers, IBANs — locates each one on the page, and marks it. You can add your own terms for the things patterns cannot know, such as a name. Every mark is shown before anything is exported, and any one of them can be clicked to keep it visible. The export burns the boxes into re-rendered pages, so the words leave the file rather than being covered up.
Features
Nine detectors, from email addresses to payment cards and national identifiers
Card numbers are checked against their checksum, so ordinary long numbers are left alone
Add your own terms for names and codenames the patterns cannot know
Overlapping matches from different detectors merge into one box
Page-by-page review — click any box to keep that occurrence visible
A count of what was found, broken down by kind
Export burns the boxes in, so the text underneath is gone
How to use the Auto-Redact PDF
Drop the PDF onto the page
Choose which detectors to run and add any terms of your own
Page through and click any box that should not be there
Redact and download, then check the result
Example
Input
support-tickets.pdf — 46 pages, standard detectors plus "Project Halifax"
Output
Email addresses: 112 · Phone numbers: 38 · Your own terms: 9
Payment card matches that fail the checksum are excluded before this count.
Common errors & troubleshooting
Nothing was found in a scanned document. — There is no text layer to match against. Run it through text recognition first, or mark the areas by hand with Redact PDF.
A name was not detected. — No pattern can recognise a name it has never seen. Add it to your own terms — matching there is literal and case-insensitive.
Ordinary dates were blacked out. — The date detector matches any date, not only dates of birth. It is switched off by default for exactly that reason.
The result is no longer selectable text. — That is what genuine redaction costs here — pages are re-rendered so the removed words do not exist in the new file. Run text recognition afterwards if it must stay searchable.
Frequently asked questions
Can automatic detection be trusted on its own?
No, and the tool says so beside the button. Pattern matching finds things shaped like personal data; it misses names it cannot recognise and finds nothing at all in a scan. Review every page before you send the file.
How is this different from Redact PDF?
Redact PDF is manual: you drag over what has to go. This finds candidates automatically across every page, and you review rather than hunt. Both burn the result in the same way.
Why are IP addresses and dates off by default?
Because they match constantly in ordinary documents. In a log file you want them; in a contract they would black out half the page.
Can the removed text be recovered?
No. The exported pages are drawn from pixels with the boxes already painted, so the characters were never written into the new document.
Does it redact the metadata as well?
No. Metadata sits outside the page content — scan the document separately and strip it as a second step.
Related tools
Redact PDF — Black out words and areas so they are gone from the file.
PDF Privacy Scanner — Find the metadata and personal data hiding inside a PDF.
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Flatten PDF — Lock filled form fields into the page so a PDF looks the same everywhere.
PDF OCR — Recognise the text in a scanned PDF and make it searchable.
Blur & Redact Image — Permanently blur, pixelate or black out parts of a screenshot before sharing it.
Encrypt PDF — Password-protect a PDF with AES-256 or RC4 encryption.
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