HardRedact

The problem

A black box is not a redaction.

Drawing a filled rectangle over a name hides it from your eyes and nothing else. The text stays in the file, underneath. Anyone can select it, copy it, or read it with two lines of code.

In February 2026 the Department of Justice published roughly 3.5 million pages of Epstein-related files with thousands of failed redactions of exactly this kind. A Wall Street Journal review found the full names of dozens of victims still readable under the bars. Courts were still hearing argument about it in August.

The document below is “redacted” the same way. Try it.

DECLARATION OF WITNESS
Name: Marcus Delaney
Address: 128 Bayview Terrace, San Rafael
SSN: 452-33-8194
Contact: marcus.delaney@example.com

Nothing here is a trick. The bars are real, the text is underneath them, and this is what most “redacted” PDFs look like on the inside.

How it works

Four steps, in this order, every time.

STEP 1

Find

Pattern rules for emails, phone numbers, card numbers, tax and social security identifiers — each confirmed by its own checksum, so a lookalike is not flagged. Add your own terms, or draw a box over anything else. No document ever leaves your machine.

STEP 2

Review

You accept or reject every finding. Nothing is removed on the software's own judgement, and nothing exports until you have decided.

STEP 3

Remove

Accepted areas are masked and each page is rebuilt as an image at 300 DPI. Hidden layers, metadata, annotations, attachments and old revisions cannot survive, because nothing is carried across.

STEP 4

Verify

The finished file is re-examined by three independent text extractors and a set of structural checks. If any check fails, you get no file at all.

The difference

You get a receipt, not a promise.

Every export writes an audit certificate beside the document: which checks ran, what each one found, and a SHA-256 of the finished file so anyone can confirm they are holding the same bytes you produced.

The certificate contains no personal information — not the removed values, and not hashes of them either, because a nine-digit number is trivially reversed from a hash.

Below is a real certificate, unedited, from the file this page was written against.

✓no_text_layer

✓deep_object_scan_clean

✓independent_decode_clean

✓metadata_stripped

✓xmp_removed

✓annotations_removed

✓attachments_removed

✓forms_removed

✓no_revision_history

✓no_trailing_content

✓not_encrypted

✓image_only_structure

✓needles_accounted

sha256 ff4eb9734da30f5b202d028237791d25cf990d7cc9c202d08fe5210e81fbd65a

Compared

Where the document goes.

	HardRedact	Cloud redaction tools	Acrobat Pro	Free online tools
Your file is uploaded	Never	Yes, to redact it	Not required	Yes
Removes text, not just covers it	Yes	Yes	Yes, if you use the redaction tool	Often not
Re-checks the finished file	Three extractors, 13 checks	No	No	No
Audit certificate with file hash	Every export	No	No	No
Refuses to deliver an unverified file	Yes	No	No	No
Works offline	Entirely	No	Yes	No
Price	$79 once	From $19/mo, metered by document	About $20/mo	Free

Competitor pricing as published August 2026. Acrobat redacts properly when you use its redaction tool — the common failure is people drawing black rectangles with the markup tools instead, which removes nothing.

What it does not claim

The limits, in plain sight.

A tool that sells certainty should be specific about where its certainty stops. These same statements appear on every certificate it writes.

It does not certify that everything sensitive was found

It attests that the items you accepted were removed and that the listed checks passed. Review is yours, and it matters.

It does not read text inside images

There is no OCR in this version. Words burned into a scan are not detected automatically — draw a box over them yourself.

It is not a compliance certification

No HIPAA, SOC 2, ISO or FOIA claim is made or implied. Exemption codes you apply are labels you chose, not legal determinations.

It touches one file

Your original is never modified, and never erased. Backups, mail attachments and previous copies are still wherever you left them.

Buy once

$79 ONE TIME

No subscription, no account, no per-document metering. Seven-day trial with everything unlocked; after that, review keeps working and export asks for a key.

macOS 13 or later, Apple silicon and Intel. Activation sends your licence key and nothing else.

How your data is handled