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The best way to redact a document in practice is not to go over it with blur or black boxes, but to completely delete the text you want to redact, and replace i
by noodlesUK 2y ago
The best way to redact a document in practice is not to go over it with blur or black boxes, but to completely delete the text you want to redact, and replace it with a placeholder such as REDACTED. This means you won't leak length or anything else. Of course, it can change formatting and page numbers, so it's worth being mindful of that.
Just make sure you don't use a file format which supports history (such as PDF).
If you have to redact with black boxes, the safest way is to redact-rasterise-OCR. That obviously breaks some stuff though and degrades your document quality.
- jstummbillig 2y ago> Of course, it can change formatting and page numbers, so it's worth being mindful of that. The way this is phrased may give the impression that this is not much of a deal breaker in practical application as long as you just keep it in mind, but it really is.
- yummypaint 2y agoOn the other hand, leaving the length of the original text unchanged can leak information. Imagine a person's full name is redacted but it's only 7 characters long in total. That massively cuts down on the possibilities and may be enough to unmask their identity if there are only a few thousand names that might plausibly be listed.
- 01HNNWZ0MV43FF 2y agoAnd that's why it would pay to design extra padding into fields such as names
- noodlesUK 2y agoIt really depends on the context. If you’re talking about evidence in a court case where things are referred to by page number that’s one thing, but if you’re a public authority releasing some internal manual, there’s no need to keep the formatting identical, especially if you’re omitting entire sections.