About redacting and sanitizing PDFs in Acrobat Pro

Learn more about removing sensitive or confidential information before sharing documents in Adobe Acrobat.

PDF redaction and sanitization help protect sensitive information in digital documents. They allow you to remove visible and hidden content from PDFs before sharing or distributing them.

Redaction

Redaction permanently hides sensitive information from a PDF document. In Acrobat Pro, redacted content, such as text or images, is replaced with colored boxes, ensuring that sensitive information cannot be recovered or viewed.

Sanitization

Sanitization focuses on removing hidden data from PDFs. This includes metadata, embedded content, scripts, and other non-visible elements that could contain sensitive information or pose security risks.

Benefits of redacting and sanitizing PDFs

 Redaction and sanitization offer several key benefits: 

1. Privacy protection: Safeguarding personal or confidential information from unauthorized access.
2. Compliance: Meeting legal and regulatory requirements for data protection and information sharing.
3. Security: Preventing the exploitation of hidden data that could pose cybersecurity risks.
4. Intellectual property protection: Controlling what information is shared when distributing documents.

Redaction limitations 

• Permanence: Redaction is permanent and cannot be undone once applied and saved.
• Scope: Redaction removes only visible text and graphics. Hidden data, such as metadata or embedded content, must be sanitized separately.