Redact a contract before you share it

Sharing an agreement outside the deal usually means taking the personal details out of it first, and then making sure the copy you send cannot be opened by whoever the email is forwarded to.

• The text is removed, not covered with a black rectangle.
• A password is set on the finished copy, never on the original.
• Both steps run here. Nothing is uploaded at either stage.

Covering is not removing

The common way this goes wrong is a black rectangle drawn over a name. It looks right on screen and in print, and the name is still in the file underneath it, where selecting the text or opening the document in a different reader brings it straight back. Redactions published that way have made the news more than once.

Redaction here takes the characters out of the page content and then draws the mark, so what is left in the file is the mark. That is the difference between a document you can send and a document that merely looks like one.

Why the password step belongs in the same job

A redacted contract is still a contract, and the usual reason for redacting it is that it is about to travel. Setting the password in the same run means there is never a window where the finished copy is sitting in a downloads folder unprotected, and it means the password is applied to the redacted file rather than to the original by mistake.

The password is typed into a field of its own when the plan runs. It is never read out of the instruction, never written into a saved workflow, and never included in a shared link, because an instruction is the one part of this that people copy to each other.

Read the plan before you run it. The redactor works from patterns, and a pattern is a good way to find every email address and a poor way to find a name nobody expected. Look at the marked document afterwards as well: this removes what it found, and only you know what it was supposed to find.

What counts as a personal detail?

Names, email addresses, phone numbers, and the identifier formats the redactor recognises. You choose which types to remove before it runs.

Is the original changed?

No. Every tool here writes a new file and leaves what you picked alone.

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