Redaction by scenario: what to cover in contracts, medical records, and resumes

Cover: real names and ID numbers of both parties, signatures, bank accounts, quoted amounts (if redacting for an external party), phone numbers and addresses.

Easy to miss: tracked changes and revision history (traces of a price change), the document number in the footer, and metadata left by the signing platform. Run a full-text PII scan before sharing.

Cover: name, patient/visit ID, national ID, address, insurance number — and specific diagnoses where warranted.

Easy to miss: patient identifiers repeated in the page header/footer, QR/barcodes (which often encode the visit ID), and information that exists as an image in scanned reports.

Cover: full card/account numbers (keep at most the last four), balances, counterparty names, and addresses.

Easy to miss: account-holder info outside the table, the export account number in the PDF metadata, and a watermark-style account number repeated on every page.

Next step: once the sensitive fields are masked, if you still need the statement as a spreadsheet for bookkeeping or expenses, you can convert your redacted statement into a clean Excel or CSV, locally — the parsing runs in your browser, so the original file is never uploaded.

When posting publicly, cover: home address, national ID, date of birth (to avoid age bias), and sensitive current-employer details.

Easy to miss: your real name in the file properties (even if the body uses an alias) and the author field written by your export tool — remember to strip metadata.

PDF editing supports basic, unencrypted files up to 50 pages and 25 MiB. Nonempty annotations, internal or external links, forms, attachments, actions and layers are unsupported and stop processing before export. Redaction rebuilds every page as an image, removing searchable and accessible text from all pages. Metadata removal retains supported page content. Output checks reread the actual file, cover only listed items, and do not run OCR. Visually review every output page.