Free Online Document Redaction Checker

About the Document Redaction Checker

Redaction is easy to get wrong. A document can look clean while still containing an email address in a footer, a phone number in a table, or a client name inside a comment. This checker scans pasted text or a selectable-text PDF for common personal and sensitive patterns: email addresses, phone numbers, US Social Security numbers, payment card numbers, URLs, and any custom terms you add. It reports counts, shows short snippets around each match, and produces a text report you can attach to a review record. It does not edit the document, and it does not upload anything.

The PDF reader uses pdf.js and extracts text page by page. Scanned documents made only of images usually have no selectable text, so they need OCR before a text-based check can help. Card numbers are validated with the Luhn checksum to reduce false positives, and phone candidates are filtered by digit count. Even so, pattern matching has limits. It cannot see a face in a photo, read handwriting, understand that a project code identifies a person, or know that a combination of quasi-identifiers is re-identifying. Use the results as a prompt for human review, not as a guarantee.

What each check looks for

• Emails: standard address shapes with a local part, domain, and two-or-more-letter suffix.
• Phones: candidates with 7 to 15 digits, allowing common separators and an optional country code. Date-like strings are filtered out.
• SSNs: the US 123-45-6789 format. Other formats and national ID schemes are not detected.
• Card numbers: 13 to 19 digit sequences that pass the Luhn checksum.
• URLs: http, https, and www addresses, which may reveal internal systems or tracking parameters.
• Custom terms: literal case-insensitive phrases you list, such as client names or project codes.

Practical redaction advice

True redaction removes the underlying content, not just the visible pixels. Drawing a black box over text in a PDF editor can leave the text layer intact and copyable; use a tool that removes the text and metadata, or flatten the page to an image when appropriate. Check document properties, comments, tracked changes, hidden sheets, speaker notes, and embedded files as well as the visible page. For PDFs, verify the result by selecting all text and searching for the removed value. For spreadsheets, check hidden rows and columns. For images, inspect the background and reflections, not only the subject.

This tool is an informational aid. It is not legal advice, not a compliance certification, and not a guarantee that a document is safe to publish. A qualified reviewer should make the final decision, especially for legal, medical, financial, or personnel records. Keep the original secure, work on a copy, and record what was removed and why.

Frequently asked questions