4 ms·
Relatedly (and this is probably not surprising to anyone here) if you draw a black box on a PDF file to cover sensitive information, chances are a simple screen
by sly010 6y ago
Relatedly (and this is probably not surprising to anyone here) if you draw a black box on a PDF file to cover sensitive information, chances are a simple screen reader will still able to extract the information just fine.
- ciarannolan 6y agoRedact ---> print ---> scan ---> distribute. I think US courts and lawyers are finally starting to learn this.
- zinekeller 6y agoPaperless edition: Redact ---> convert to image ---> convert to PDF ---> distribute.
- ShakataGaNai 6y agoThat's why you always use the Adobe Acrobat Redaction tool. It'll obliterate everything and the metadata too!
- dawnerd 6y agoFound this out the other day on that story from the port explosion. They had a pdf with blacked out names, but you could just copy the text and paste it and it wasn't blacked out.
- gxqoz 6y agoEven if you do black box -> separate screenshot? Is that because the OCR is encoded in white pixels you didn't redact?
- ShakataGaNai 6y agoIf you take a screenshot of a PDF file that's been blacked out, then you're fine. There is no more OCR.
- gjvnq 6y agoThe safest way to redact PDFs is to convert them to images, draw black boxes on the sensitive content and create a new PDF from these images. This way the redacted PDF won't have any metadata from the original (e.g. bookmarks) nor risk any weired PDF redaction bugs. The downside is that your redacted PDF is (probably) larger than the original and isn't accessible. You can mitigate this by using OCR but it still isn't perfect and has a high chance of messing up tables or any special text placement. Some fancy combination of encodings (e.g. using JBIG2 except for images) can probably help with the filesize. --------- The best way to handle sensitive information is probably to use codenames (for people, places, etc) so you can share the original documents without worrying so much.