There is no need to feel bad if you don't know what redaction means — you are not alone. When US Attorney Robert Mueller released his 400-page report in 2019, lookups for the word in the Merriam-Webster dictionary spiked by 4,000%!
The word redaction has several meanings but the ones we're interested in here are:
- "to select or adapt (as by obscuring or removing sensitive information) for publication or release"
- "to obscure or remove (text) from a document prior to publication or release."
In the days before digital documents, redactions were carried out with felt-tip pens, cutting holes in pages, or removing type from printers before printing a document.
Censorship is a cousin of the word, but it doesn't mean the same thing. Redaction is usually used in the context of protecting information that might lead to someone's harm, such as their Social Security Number or the physical address of a key witness. And censorship applies more to the control of information for political purposes.
Of course, to censor anything, you have to redact it. 🙂
What is PDF redaction?
PDF redaction refers specifically to the digital removal or obscuring of sensitive information in a PDF file.
PDF stands for Portable Document Format and it was a format developed by Adobe in 1992 that could be displayed correctly on computers and printers regardless of the software or hardware being used. Because of this wide compatibility, PDFs were adopted as the de facto standard for sending digital documents around.
Unfortunately, this very strength is also what makes PDF documents difficult to redact. PDFs are not always editable. And, when they are, they usually require expensive software (provided by Adobe) to do so. This has gotten better in recent years, but Adobe still ruled the roost as far as PDF redaction goes — until now.
The other aspect that makes PDFs difficult to redact is that sometimes they aren't editable at all. There are technical reasons for this that we won't get into here, but the only way to redact these uneditable files has been to "paint over" the text you want redacted. Although this is good enough for the average user, savvy programmers could get around this quite easily with simple tools if it wasn't done properly.
Why is PDF redaction necessary?
PDF redaction is arguably even more necessary than paper redaction. Data breaches mean that an exposed document can live forever on the internet. It's easier to copy a digital document and store thousands of copies of it on different servers than it is to copy a physical one.
Digital documents also don't degrade and can't be damaged by the weather.
Worst of all, some PDFs can be digitally read and their extracted data then stored in a database for cyber criminals to query so they can carry out identity fraud.
Password-protecting a PDF is not enough because the password might be weak, and better and better software gets developed every year to hack these passwords through a technique called "brute force."
Effective redaction is the only real solution.
What are the legal reasons for PDF redaction?
Completely aside from the personal ramifications of having data stolen, there are serious legal implications for companies that allow this to happen.
For example, any company doing business in Europe is subject to the continent's draconian privacy regulations, the GDPR, or General Data Protection Regulation. If a company experiences a data breach and did not take adequate steps to protect any exposed data, that company can be fined up to €20 million ($21.3 million). 😱
California likewise has extremely stringent privacy laws, and more and more jurisdictions are following suit.
In the health sector, data breaches can result in enormous fines because Protected Health Information (PHI) can sell for hundreds of dollars per record in the black market. The reason for the high price tag is that a lot of PHI facilitates insurance fraud in the many thousands of dollars, so cyber criminals work hard to obtain this data. And so the fines to prevent this are likewise heavy.
To protect itself against these fines, a company must:
- Implement security best-practices throughout its organization.
- Properly redact documents and PDFs where possible. This way, even if the data is exposed, the penalties will usually be less because there will be no sensitive data, or there will be less of it.
What are some of the other problems related to PDF redaction?
Files with sensitive data cannot be shared easily for collaboration between teams. PDF redaction solves this problem.
There is also the case where realistic files are needed for some project. Creating these files from scratch can impose a tremendous burden when it would be easier to redact real files so they can be safely used.
Scanned PDF files cannot be easily searched, if at all, because the scanned text is usually in the form of an image and not text. The human eye sees the text, but computers don't. This makes it difficult for computers to easily find the text to be redacted.
Probably the largest challenge is that one of the few software products that resolves many of these challenges — Adobe — is so unbelievably expensive! This puts professional redaction out of the hands of the average user, and even many smaller businesses.
How does the Ainon redaction tool solve PDF redaction problems?
Ainon.ai is a new affordable online PDF redaction tool that solves all of the above challenges through a combination of sophisticated software and advanced AI (artificial intelligence) processing.
Using our tool, even scanned PDFs can be properly redacted because the AI that powers it can recognize text in image format, and even handwriting.
The tool can completely substitute words so that they are no longer present in the document at all, not just obfuscated. This offers the ultimate in secure PDF redaction.
And, as a bonus, entire documents can be translated with just a few clicks.
Did we mention it's affordable? Yes, very affordable. No need to fork out thousands for that "other" software. 😁
How to get started with the Ainon redaction tool
Getting started with our online PDF redaction tool is as easy as signing up for a free account on our website. You can start off with 10 free PDF redactions and then sign up for one of the smaller packages if you need more.
Even the enterprise packages are competitively priced, and far more affordable than...you know who.
Click here to sign up for your free Ainon PDF redaction account today!
