PII Redactor is a professional-grade, 100% client-side security utility that identifies and permanently erases personally identifiable information (PII) from sensitive PDFs. Powered by a hybrid processing engine, it pairs highly optimized regular expression modules with localized context-aware Named Entity Recognition (NER) models executing completely inside your browser memory. Unlike traditional converters that simply layer visual black rectangles on top of copy-pastable vector text, PII Redactor offers a deep pixel-level flattening pipeline that burns the mask directly into the page pixels and clears out the underlying content stream on redacted pages. Your highly confidential contracts, tax returns, and medical records never leave your machine — providing absolute GDPR and HIPAA compliance.
PII Redactor uses a dual-engine local scanning architecture. Structured patterns with highly specific formats (such as Email Addresses, US Social Security Numbers, Credit Cards, and Phone Numbers) are scanned using high-speed regular expressions. For credit cards, it additionally runs a local Luhn validation algorithm to eliminate false matches. Unstructured and context-dependent entities (like human names, organizations, and geographical locations) are detected in context using a client-side Transformers.js Named Entity Recognition (NER) model running in a background Web Worker.
Yes, it is the safest method available. Traditional PDF redaction software uploads your files to external cloud servers, creating substantial privacy and compliance risks. PII Redactor executes 100% of its text extraction, neural network inference, pixel rendering, and PDF assembly operations locally in your browser sandboxed environment. No document data is ever sent to a server, and you can even disconnect your internet entirely after the tool loads.
Vector Overlay mode simply draws opaque rectangles over the PII text coordinates in the PDF document. While this keeps files small and vector-sharp, the underlying text stream still exists, meaning a hacker can still copy-paste or extract the sensitive text. Deep Secure Flattening (the default) renders pages with redactions to high-resolution canvas images, burns the redaction rectangles directly into the raw pixels, and replaces the vector streams with these images in the compiled PDF. This guarantees that the redacted text is permanently destroyed and 100% unrecoverable.
No, our intelligent reconstruction pipeline only flattens pages that actually contain redactions. Pages without sensitive content are copied directly as original vector layers, maintaining their perfect vector sharpness, full text searchability, and lightweight file size. For pages with redactions, they are rasterized at a high-resolution 2.0x scale (approx. 200 DPI) to ensure text remains crisp and highly readable when printed or viewed.
Yes. PII Redactor provides an "Add Custom Keywords" field. You can input any text, phrase, or keyword (such as proprietary codenames, specific accounts, or private addresses). The engine will search the entire document for exact case-insensitive matches and apply the exact same coordinate-mapped redaction overlays.
Absolutely not. All document data is processed inside volatile browser RAM. Once you close the tab or reload the page, all extracted text, coordinate mappings, and compiled PDF buffers are immediately and permanently wiped from your system's memory.