Blackout
Most tools just draw a black box over the text, and the words stay in the file — selectable underneath. Blackout removes the content for good and shows you the proof. Your file never leaves this device.
or
Your file is processed entirely in your browser — it never leaves this device.
Why it's better
A black box in Preview or Acrobat markup leaves the words in the file — copyable, extractable. Blackout flattens the page and removes the content, then re-scans the output to prove nothing's recoverable.
Everything runs on your device with WebAssembly — no upload, no server. The document you're redacting stays yours the entire time.
Redact every occurrence of a name or number in one go, or one-click auto-detect emails, phones, SSNs, cards, and IPs across the whole document — the work you can't eyeball page by page.
Questions
Really gone. On every page you redact, we rasterize the page, burn the black in, and rebuild the PDF so that page is a flat image — there is no text layer left to select, copy, or extract. The moment it finishes, we re-scan the output and show you the count of recoverable characters in the redacted areas: zero. That's the failure mode behind real leaks — a box drawn on top while the words stay in the file — and it's exactly what this avoids.
No. The whole thing runs in your browser with WebAssembly — the PDF never leaves your device and nothing is sent to a server. That's the point: redaction is usually for documents you can't hand to a third party.
Because that's the only way to be certain nothing survives under the mark. Flattening a page to pixels removes its text, vectors, and annotations in one step — there's simply no hidden layer left. Pages you don't touch keep their selectable text. It's a deliberate trade of a little searchability for a guarantee you can verify.
Yes. Type any term to redact every occurrence across the whole document, or hit Auto-detect to surface emails, phone numbers, US SSNs, credit-card numbers (checksum-validated to cut false positives), and IP addresses in one pass. Review what it marked, then apply.
You can draw redaction boxes on any PDF, including scans, and the content underneath is truly removed. Automatic find and detect need a real text layer, so for a scanned document use the box tool for now (text recognition for scans is on the roadmap).
Stripped by default. The output is rebuilt from scratch, so the original title, author, and other document metadata don't carry over, and the create/modify timestamps are reset — the identifying details tucked into a file's properties go too.