Also known as document sanitizing, redaction is important for organizations and individuals to ensure their sensitive information remains hidden from the outside world. This mostly applies to those in legal, healthcare, financial, and government fields, where data security is of utmost importance.

With the increase of digitization, it has become easier to extract and exploit data for the wrong means. Therefore, a lot has changed in terms of redaction in the modern era to protect sensitive information. Redaction isn’t limited to physical documents but digital data such as images, audio, and video. What was done using a sharpie back in the day is now using artificial intelligence-backed tools and software.

Here’s all you need to know about redaction in digital forensics.

What is Redaction

Redaction is the process of obscuring or censoring a part of the text, image, audio, video, document, or other files, before releasing it to the public/third party. Businesses do this to hide their confidential data for legal, security, or compliance reasons.

What Needs Redaction

Usually, the law requires you to redact certain elements from a file, but it’s also your ethical responsibility to conceal the private information of entities or individuals. Here’s a list of things that require redaction.

Personally Identifiable Information

Personally Identifiable Information, or PII, is the data that can directly, or when combined with other information, identify a person. It can include direct identifiers like a person’s social security number or quasi-identifier like nationality. Breach of PII can cause social, economic, or physical harm to a person or cause identity theft. Therefore, concealing it is a legal requirement.

Faces

An individual’s face or body usually doesn’t need redaction unless the person hasn’t consented to be a part of an image or video, or certain compliances offer them the right to have their information redacted.

Objects

Objects that can identify a person or share confidential data also need redaction. It can include papers, screens, blackboards, etc., shown in media files.

License Plates

Although many jurisdictions don’t consider license plates personal information, they still need redaction to avoid any wrongful act. License place data can identify an individual’s whereabouts, which can cause trouble.

Why You Need Digital Forensics for Data Redaction

Each digital file has a different format that requires different tools and techniques for redaction. Hiring a professional digital forensics services like Eclipse Forensics ensures that your files are redacted according to legal (or other) requirements.