Also make sure that you print the document with solid bar over confidential text, and then scan it.
Replicating this process digitally is quite hard. Most pdf editors will put a square over the text, so that the original can be easily recovered.
Replicating this process digitally is quite hard. Most pdf editors will put a square over the text, so that the original can be easily recovered.
https://www.alfresco.com/blogs/corporate-news/redacting-pdfs...
>Redacting PDFs – What did the Manafort Lawyers get wrong? Date: May 18, 2020
>With Paul Manafort being released from Jail on May 13th, for those in the document space like Alfresco, it was worth revisiting the PDF redaction issue that surfaced during his trial. Back in 2019, lawyers representing Paul Manafort (a former lobbyist, political consultant, and lawyer, who chaired the Trump Presidential campaign team) filed a response to special counsel Robert Mueller’s claims that he violated his cooperation agreement by repeatedly lying to prosecutors. On pages five, six, seven and nine either the lawyers or the special council staffers attempted to redact sensitive passages.
>Although parts of the public version of this filing appeared to be redacted by black bars at first glance, it quickly became apparent that anyone with Adobe Acrobat, or other PDF viewing tool, or even browser-based viewing tools, could easily copy and paste the text that still existed under the redaction blocks to another document to simply reveal the passages that had been redacted. From the UK, a similar incident happened back in 2011 with the Ministry of Defence.
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-13107413
>Internet mistake reveals UK nuclear submarine secrets
>The Ministry of Defence has admitted that secret information about the UK's nuclear powered submarines was made available on the internet by mistake.
>A technical error meant blacked-out parts of an online MoD report could be read by pasting into another document.
>Details were reported to include expert opinion on how well the fleet could cope with a catastrophic accident.
>The MoD said a secure version had now been published and it was working to stop such an incident happening again.
>Information also included measures used by the US Navy to protect its nuclear submarines, the Daily Star Sunday reported.
Redaction is usually a "Pro" feature in commercial PDF editors. People who use PDF's annotation feature to draw a big filled shape over the text/image to be redacted, don't know what they're doing and should be prepared for poor outcomes.
Adobe Acrobat and Foxit have "Pro" variants that redact properly, I'd love to know exactly how they do it. The open-source approach I'm familiar with, essentially converts the PDF to a flattened image and edits it to apply a colored shape over it. Example[1].
https://www.reddit.com/r/Wellthatsucks/comments/i1cdpl/the_d...
Although I just checked, MacOS Preview has a feature “redact” that (is supposed to) actually redact text. Well done!
That's not to say it's definitely not there, but it's at least something.
2. Set Background Text Color to black
3. Put spaces in place of redacted text
4. Save