Understanding PDF Redaction: Manual Methods vs. AI Solutions

In the last few years, many companies have experience data breaches - a situation where their confidential, private, or sensitive information was exposed to other people without authorized access. For this same reason, companies have invested in stronger security, like data privacy trainings, document management systems with access permissions, setting standards for document storage and sharing, and so on. However, some surveys have shown that 21% of data leaks come from poor PDF redaction. This could be for many reasons, whether they did it manually or automatically.

Therefore, in this blog, we would like to examine side by side the benefits and limitations of manual and AI-powered pdf redaction in order for you to make an informed decision regarding the approach you want to take to protect your company's data.

Manual PDF Redaction

Even though, manual PDF redaction involves software tools, such as Adobe, the whole redaction process will be done personally. In other words, with the help of a software tool we are able to obscure or remove information, but the identification, redaction, and verification of the confidential information has to be done by a human. More specifically, this process entails reading through document to identify sensitive information, the remove them one by one, and finally, review the document one more time to make sure that nothing is being overlooked.

One advantage of this method is that it can be very accurate since humans can understand and distinguish the context, and identify which information is considered sensitive in that context. Moreover, doing it ourselves means that we have full control of what is being removed from the document and what is being kept in the document. Lastly, we can make decisions based on the requirements and structure of the given document.

Unfortunately, this method comes with some constraints as well. For instance, it can take much more time to redact a PDF manually because of all the reading, analyzing the content to decide what falls under the "confidential" category, checking if this information has been fully removed, and sometimes even double-checking. Furthermore, there are many external aspects that could affect the redacting process, like fatigue or distractions. Finally, as the data volume increases we would need a person to handle more and more documents, which may not be practical unless more personnel is hired.

AI-Powered PDF Redaction

On the other hand, we have AI-powered PDF redaction that makes use of machine learning and natural language processing (NLP) to be able to do the whole redaction process on its own. In short, we only need to submit the document we wish to redact to our PDF redaction tool, specify what is considered confidential for the AI model to know what it's looking for, and let AI do the magic. These tools are incredible at recognizing patterns, keywords, and contextual cues thanks to these technologies.

One benefit of this method is its efficiency because it is able to handle large volumes of data in a short amount of time. Additionally, having this process automated also means that the redaction will be consistent across thousands of documents, unlike with humans. Besides, this tool has been created for large organizations, meaning that it could handle increasing workloads without the need of extra workers. Ultimately, thanks to the used technologies, this tool is also able to understand context and make a judgement on complex and non-obvious sensitive information.

Sadly, AI has also its limitations. For example, the effectiveness of this method might depend on the quality of the data provided and how good can they understand it based on the training data. Subsequently, even though that AI could reduce human errors, it can also make an error itself and miss sensitive information or redact non-sensitive data.