Need to hide confidential information? ButDoc's PDF Redactor allows you to securely blackout sensitive text, images, and data from your documents directly in your web browser.
Whether you are dealing with legal contracts, financial records, or personal forms, our tool ensures your private data is permanently removed, not just covered up. Avoid expensive software and redact your documents safely and instantly.
Sanitizing your document is fast and easy. Follow these simple instructions to permanently hide your data.
We take data security seriously. Here is why professionals trust ButDoc for document redaction:
The most common data leak in the world is not hacking — it is bad redaction. People open a PDF, draw a black rectangle over a name or a number, and save it. It looks hidden. It is not. That black box is just a shape sitting on top of the text, and the original words are still in the file underneath. Anyone can select the text, copy it, and paste it straight out — or simply delete the box. Courts, governments, and major companies have all leaked sensitive data this exact way.
Real redaction removes the underlying content, not just the view of it. When you redact with ButDoc, the text and data beneath the blackout are permanently stripped from the file, so there is nothing left to copy, uncover, or recover. What you send is genuinely gone from the document.
Sensitive information hides in more places than people expect. Before you share a document publicly or with someone outside your organisation, it is worth scanning for anything that could identify a person or expose an account.
Common items to blackout include full names and home addresses, social security and national ID numbers, bank account and card numbers, phone numbers and email addresses, signatures, dates of birth, medical details, and salary or pricing figures in contracts. On scanned documents, remember that a photograph of an ID or a handwritten note is data too — redact the image, not just the typed text near it.
If you handle documents under privacy rules such as GDPR or HIPAA, redaction is not optional — it is how you share records without exposing the people in them. Law firms redact privileged content before discovery, HR teams remove personal data before circulating reports, and healthcare staff strip patient identifiers before sharing case files. In every one of these situations, the difference between a shape drawn on top and data actually removed is the difference between compliance and a reportable breach.
For the highest sensitivity documents, a good habit is to redact first and then flatten the file so no layers remain — you can do that with our Flatten PDF tool as a final step.