The redaction has always been a big part of the evidence for court proceedings. Redaction can be of many different types, such as text redaction, image redaction, and video redaction. There are many reasons and ways that you can redact files. It’s imperative to redact files in this digital age so that many courts will require this.
What is Redaction?
Redaction refers to obfuscating or censoring a portion of a file (text, audio, image, document, video, etc.). This action is done before the file is released to conceal information for security, legal, or compliance reasons.
Why Redact Certain Information from Files?
Redaction is a way to protect the information of all of the personnel mentioned in court documents. Redaction is a method of data privacy. It is also a practice required by law and ensures that evidence is held in court.
There is certain information that lawyers must redact. The major categories include:
Identification Information
Personal identification includes a person’s name, birth date, social security number, and medical information. It may be divided into sensitive and non-sensitive PII, with the former referring to information that is accessible to the general public and the latter to information that is not.
Compromising critical PII can result in identity theft and information misuse, hurting a person physically, financially, or socially.
Faces or Bodies
With the video and image evidence slowly coming into more excellent circulation, it’s also essential that the face or body of a person is redacted from official files in some cases.
The face can be redacted when a person is in a video without consent. This occurrence is typical in several YouTube prank videos where the subjects object to having their faces shown.
Secondly, specific regulations allow consumers to have their information—including faces—erased. Article 17 of the GDPR (Right to be Forgotten), which allows people to ask organizations to delete all the information they have about them, illustrates this.
Objects
There aren’t strict rules around object redaction as they are pretty general, but particular objects can giveaway location and personality, which is why this may be redacted. Usually, redactions are used to remove objects like screens, blackboards, scattered papers, etc., from recordings to preserve privacy. These might hold data, the loss of which could hurt a company or entity physically, socially, or financially.
To comply with internet laws, certain items, such as guns and other deadly weapons, may be redacted.
Final Thoughts
Lawyers may also redact other information like license plates as that too gives up information. The primary reasons for redaction are the maintenance of privacy and ensuring that people involved are safe. Redaction is also necessary depending on the regulations followed by courts in certain states and counties.
For more information, please visit us at www.eclipseforensics.com.