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 you black out is flattened to an image and rebuilt as an image-only PDF, so the text, vectors, and metadata beneath your boxes are permanently gone with nothing left to extract. Auto-detect can OCR the pages and suggest 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.
Drop your PDF
Drag the PDF onto the page or click to browse. It opens in the GhostPDF studio with Redact pre-selected.
Mark what to hide
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.
Apply and download
Applying flattens each affected page to an image with the boxes burned in and rebuilds the PDF, then downloads it — the text under the boxes is truly destroyed.
Does GhostPDF really remove the text, or just cover it?
It removes it. Each redacted 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.
Can it find sensitive information automatically?
Yes. Auto-detect runs OCR on the pages 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.
Is my document uploaded to redact it?
No. The OCR, the detection, and the 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.
Why is the redacted PDF an image, and no longer selectable?
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.
Every GhostPDF tool runs entirely in your browser. Your file is never uploaded — there's no upload endpoint to send it to.