Black out sensitive areas and the text underneath is permanently destroyed, not just covered. Auto-detect PII or draw boxes yourself — entirely on your device.
Black out sensitive areas and the text underneath is permanently destroyed, not just covered. Auto-detect PII or draw boxes yourself — entirely on your device.
Most 'redaction' tools just draw a black rectangle over the words — and the text is still sitting in the PDF underneath, recoverable by anyone who copies, searches, or runs an extractor on the file. GhostPDF redacts for real: every page is flattened to an image with your boxes burned in and rebuilt as an image-only PDF, so the text, vectors, and metadata beneath them are permanently gone with nothing left to extract. Auto-detect reads the text layer (and OCRs any page that doesn't have one) and suggests boxes over likely sensitive data — emails, Social Security numbers, credit-card numbers, phone numbers — which you review and accept one by one, or you can draw boxes by hand. Everything runs in your browser; the document is never uploaded. Free, no signup.
How it works
Drag the PDF onto the page or click to browse. It opens in the GhostPDF studio with Black out (redact) pre-selected.
Click Auto-detect sensitive info to have GhostPDF suggest boxes over likely PII, accept the ones you want, and drag over anything else you want blacked out.
Applying flattens every page to an image with the boxes burned in and rebuilds the PDF, then downloads it — the text under the boxes is truly destroyed.
It removes it. Every page is rasterized and rebuilt as an image, so unlike a black rectangle drawn over live text, there is nothing underneath your boxes to copy, search, or extract.
Yes. Auto-detect reads each page's text layer — or OCRs pages that don't have one — entirely in your browser and suggests boxes over patterns like emails, Social Security numbers, credit-card numbers, and phone numbers. Suggestions are opt-in — nothing is redacted until you accept it.
No. The text extraction, OCR, detection, and redaction all run in your browser tab — the PDF is never sent to a server. You can confirm it in your browser's DevTools Network tab.
That's the point of true redaction: the only way to guarantee the hidden text can't be recovered is to flatten the page to pixels. The trade-off is that the output text is no longer selectable — which is the correct exchange for a redaction tool.
A reproducible test of six free redaction tools: what each one actually removed, and what it left in the file.
Why a black rectangle over PDF text usually hides nothing, and what real redaction removes.
A step-by-step checklist for confirming that redacted content can’t be recovered.
Remove metadata
Strip author, dates, and hidden properties before a PDF leaves you.
Password-protect PDF
Encrypt a PDF so it needs your password to open — encrypted locally.
Split PDF
Extract page ranges into separate PDFs, zipped for download.
Edit PDF
Type on any page, highlight, draw boxes — fill forms that were never fillable.
Timestamp PDF
Prove a document existed at a point in time with a cryptographic stamp.
Redact medical records
Remove PHI — names, SSNs, dates, record numbers — without uploading the record.
Redact a bank statement
Black out account numbers and transactions before you send a statement.
Every GhostPDF tool runs entirely in your browser. Your file is never uploaded — there's no upload endpoint to send it to.