The protection of sensitive information is paramount for you and your business alike. Whether it’s legal documents, personal privacy matters, or business confidentiality, redacting confidential information is a critical step in ensuring your data protection and compliance.
In fact, in 2023, Sony made headlines for accidentally leaking the budgets and development timelines of two of its biggest game titles by failing to redact a court-submitted document properly. This massive breach of confidential business data from a massive company acts as a reminder to you that data redaction should be taken more seriously than simply using a black pen.
Also, let’s face it, manually blacking out text with a marker is far from ideal. It’s tedious, time-consuming, and, worse still, prone to human error.
In this blog, we’ll explore effective alternatives for you and your business seeking to redact documents. By understanding the benefits of automated redaction and the pitfalls of doing it improperly, you can navigate the treacherous waters of data security. Let’s go!
What is Document Redaction?
Document redaction is the process of obscuring or removing sensitive information from documents before they are shared or published. The goal is to make sensitive data inaccessible while keeping the rest of the document intact and readable.
Document Redaction in Different Sectors
With laws like GDPR, HIPAA, and CCPA in place, companies must ensure they handle data responsibly. Here are some real-world examples of the need for document redaction.
Legal Sector: Redacting sensitive information like personal identifiers, financial details, and privileged communication is crucial for protecting individuals’ privacy and ensuring legal proceedings.
Healthcare: Redacting personal health information (PHI) from medical records ensures that sensitive details remain confidential, allowing healthcare providers to uphold trust and compliance with regulations like HIPAA.
Finance and Banking: Redacting personal financial information from documents such as loan applications or account statements, banks prioritize customer privacy and comply with rigid regulations, fostering trust and security.
Human Resources: Redacting and anonymizing HR documents containing sensitive employee details during internal reviews or external audits, allows companies to demonstrate their commitment to fair and respectful workplace practices.
Public Sector: Redacting governmental records before their release under freedom of information laws ensures transparency while safeguarding national security and respecting individuals’ privacy rights.
Education: Schools and universities should safeguard student confidentiality by redacting identifiers from academic records, to maintain privacy and data security.
The stakes remain high when it comes to redacting sensitive and confidential information across different industries. Let’s dive into the steps of how exactly document redaction works in practice with our solution.
How Does Document Redaction Work with Klippa?
Our solution, Klippa DocHorizon allows you to redact documents in 1 of 2 ways. You can opt for either scanning with our mobile scanning SDK or uploading the document to our software and configuring the OCR engine to redact the necessary fields. Here’s how the process works in 4 small steps:
Step 1a: Define What To Redact
Configure what you want to redact from the uploaded document (data fields, PII, signatures, photos, and more).
Step 1b: Upload Documents or Images
Send documents or images to our AI-powered engine via email, FTP, web- or mobile application, or scan it via mobile SDK. When using our mobile scanner, data masking functionalities allow users to scan and draw a masking box over the information they wish to be masked.
Step 2: AI-Powered Redaction
Klippa DocHorizon then removes the sensitive data from a document based on the configurations.
Step 3: Data Extraction
After the redaction, the engine extracts all non-redacted data and converts it into the desired file format such as JSON, CSV, XLSX, or XML.
Step 4: Final Output
The final output can then be downloaded or forwarded to your desired business system via our OCR API.
With Klippa DocHorizon, you can easily redact images, PII, signatures, faces, and chunks of text from a range of document types including identity documents, contracts, financial documents, and more.
The Benefits of Automating Document Redaction
By automating the process of redacting documents, you can enjoy a range of long-term benefits.
- Time Efficiency: Automated redaction software drastically time spent on the redaction of documents by swiftly identifying and removing sensitive content, surpassing manual methods’ speed and accuracy.
- Accuracy and Precision: Automated tools ensure consistent and precise redaction, minimizing human error and the thorough redaction of sensitive information.
- Enhanced Security: The automated redaction of documents strengthens document security, employing advanced encryption and access controls to protect against unauthorized access and data breaches.
- Compliance and Regulatory Adherence: Automated redaction software aids in maintaining compliance with privacy regulations like HIPAA and GDPR by systematically redacting confidential information, mitigating the risk of regulatory violations.
Final Thoughts
In conclusion, accurate document redaction is a critical aspect of data protection and compliance today. To depend on manual redaction in the face of advanced technologies would be to risk the security of sensitive and confidential information. Additionally, with the help of technology and automation, you can ensure that document redaction remains efficient and secure and maintains regulatory standards.
Are you done with manual document redaction? Book a free demo down below or contact our experts with any questions you may have!