Redact a PDF — remove Aadhaar, PAN and account numbers for good

Gone. A page with a mark is rebuilt as a picture of the page with the boxes painted in, and that picture replaces the page: the original text, fonts and images of that page are not in the new file. Copy, search or open the file in any editor and the redacted words are not there. Pages without a mark are copied as they were, minus comments and form fields.

No. The PDF is read, redacted and saved by your browser, with pdf.js and pdf-lib downloaded from this site when you choose the file. The only thing we are told is that a run happened — not the file, its name, its pages or what you marked.

Aadhaar numbers (only ones that pass the Aadhaar checksum), PAN, IFSC codes, GSTIN, voter ID numbers, passport machine-readable lines, Indian mobile numbers, email and UPI ids, card numbers (only ones that pass the card checksum) and account numbers written after "A/c" or "Account". Indian passport numbers can be switched on too. Anything else you can search for, as plain text or a regular expression, or cover with a box.

A scanned PDF has no text to search, so draw boxes over what must go — there is no OCR here yet. A redacted page becomes a picture, so the file grows and text you did not mark on that page stays searchable only if you keep that option on; text that touched a mark is removed from the search layer too. Bookmarks are dropped. On pages you did not mark, hidden layers are kept as they were; comments and form fields are removed everywhere.

No mark is drawn on your file beyond your own boxes. Its metadata records that it was made at filedone.ai with no AI involved, which detectors you used, and a provenance id — nothing else about you or the original document.