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Compliance
How can you be sure your documents are 100% redacted?
Discover how Cleardox ensures 100% secure redaction, protecting sensitive data while saving time and preventing costly human errors.
Emilie Eriksen
4 min
How can you be sure your documents are 100% redacted?
December 19, 2024
Introduction
In today’s world, data leaks happen far too often when using generic PDF tools for manual redaction. While some tools include built-in redaction features, they often fall short, leaving you to manually identify every sensitive detail. Simply placing a black box over data is also risky, as it can be easily removed, exposing hidden text. Ensuring strong security measures for handling sensitive data is one of the core reasons we’re in business. Here’s how we’re working to prevent data leaks.
1. Catching what the human eye misses
At Cleardox, we elevate security by ensuring that our intelligent anonymization software automatically screens and identifies sensitive information across +20 distinct categories (e.g., social security numbers, addresses, phone numbers, etc.). While also making it possible to create your own categories if needed.
This is a very important security measure that we believe is essential since it reduces the chance of human error by automatically scanning documents for sensitive information, instead of manually looking for all of it. This also saves users time from manually reviewing each document line by line and minimizes the risk of missed redactions.
2. The Black Box Illusion
Are you sure that simply placing a black box over your text will truly anonymize it? Although some standard PDF programs can technically anonymize information, it’s easy to make mistakes by using only a black overlay. This method often allows the underlying text to remain, meaning the data can be copied and exposed even with the black box in place.
This cannot happen with Cleardox. Once you choose to redact something either by blackling it or pseudonymizing it, it is then securely removed from the downloaded version, making it impossible to retrieve the original data. Even if the black box was removed, there would be nothing underneath.
Cleardox is born with a high level of security:
For us, security isn’t just our core value - it’s our mission. A mission we would never compromise with. We aim to enhance the protection of critical data, preventing leaks and ensuring that data is shared and utilized safely and responsibly.
It’s our pleasure to provide an anonymization software solution that prioritizes security at every single step, and in a time when cybersecurity is more important than ever, safeguarding the data of individuals, businesses, and institutions remains our highest priority. As a Cleardox user, you can have complete confidence that your documents are handled with the utmost care and responsibility across all our services.
With Cleardox, we’ve built a secure “PDF engine” (you might call it) specifically for focused redaction, ensuring that errors can’t happen. Take a look at this "engine" of ours and the measures we've taken to uphold our high security standards.
Explore our multi-level security structure:
- Front-end to back-end - happens via a secure TLS connection
- Customer level encryption - ensures that each customer has their own protected domain in Cleardox
- Document Level Encryption - Ensures that each document is protected with its own unique key
- Automatic deletion deadlines - all documents in Cleardox are automatically deleted after 30 days.
- A purely European setup - our security system complies with European standards.
Essential IT certifications ensure your data’s safety:
We also have all our security implementations documented in an ISAE 3000 Type II report, which everyone are more than welcome to review and download here.
👉 Learn more about our security structure at https://www.cleardox.io/security or contact us here to get a free trial period of Cleardox.
Warm regards,
The Cleardox team
How does Cleardox ensure that no sensitive information is missed during redaction?
Cleardox automatically scans documents across 20+ data categories, ensuring that even hidden or easily overlooked sensitive information is identified. This significantly reduces the risk of human error compared to manual redaction.
Is using a black box over text enough for proper redaction?
No. A black box can often leave underlying text intact and recoverable. Cleardox ensures the data is fully removed, not just visually hidden and it can never be recovered.
What makes AI detection more reliable than manual review?
Cleardox intelligent AI can scan thousands of pages consistently without fatigue, catching details the human eye might miss. This significantly increases accuracy in identifying sensitive information such as IDs, names, phone numbers, addresses, company details etc.
How does Cleardox improve security compared to generic PDF tools?
Unlike standard PDF tools, Cleardox is designed for the redaction use case and uses AI to automatically detect and group all sensitive information across different categories, then presents it in a clear overview so users can easily decide what should be anonymized. Anonymization can’t be reversed and Cleardox converts all files into a secure PDF workflow, including OCR processing of scanned documents and images. In addition, Cleardox can detect hidden elements like white text or concealed data layers and surface them for review, reducing the risk of anything being missed.
Is Cleardox compliant with modern data security standards?
Yes, Cleardox is fully GDPR compliant and its security setup is documented in an ISAE 3000 Type II assurance statement with a high level of verified security. The platform is built with encrypted connections, customer- and document-level encryption, and automatic deletion of documents after 30 days. All anonymization is irreversible, and metadata is automatically removed during processing.