Hide Personal Details in Text
Instant results as you type.
People paste bank statements into chat, error logs into support tickets, and screenshots of forms into group threads, and the account number goes along with them. This finds the personal information in your text — emails, phone numbers, card and account numbers, IP addresses — and hides it before the text goes anywhere. It is the same idea as the redact tool for PDFs, applied to anything you can paste. It tells you exactly what it changed, because a tool that silently rewrote your text would be worse than none at all.
How to use it
- Paste your text. Nothing is uploaded; the searching happens in your browser.
- Choose what to hide. Everything sensible is on by default.
- The last few characters are kept by default, so you can still say which account you mean without giving away the number.
- You are told what was found and how many of each. Read the result before you send it.
Examples
- A bank statement pasted into a chat, with the account and card numbers hidden
- An error log for a support ticket, with the customer email and IP addresses removed
Frequently asked questions
- What does this find?
- Email addresses, phone numbers, card numbers, bank IBANs, IP addresses, Aadhaar numbers, PAN numbers and US social security numbers. Card numbers are checked against the checksum that every real card satisfies, so an order reference of the same length is left alone. There is also an option for any long number, which catches account numbers — it is off by default because it will also catch invoice references and IDs you probably want to keep.
- Will it catch everything?
- No, and you should not treat it as though it will. It finds things that follow a recognisable pattern. It cannot know that a name is sensitive, that a date of birth is a date of birth, or that a sentence describes something private. Use it as a first pass that catches the obvious and tedious cases, then read the result yourself before sending. Anything that claimed to catch everything would be lying to you about a thing that matters.
- Why is it not hiding a long number I expected?
- Most likely it is not a card number. The card rule uses a checksum rather than counting digits, so a sixteen-digit order reference or a timestamp is deliberately left alone. If you want long numbers hidden regardless of what they are, switch on the any long number option — but expect it to catch references you wanted to keep, which is exactly why it is not on by default.
- Should I keep the last few characters?
- Usually yes, and it is on by default. Leaving the last four digits lets you have a useful conversation — your bank can tell which card you mean, a colleague can tell which account a log line refers to — while giving away nothing that identifies it on its own. Switch it off when even that is too much, such as text going somewhere public.
- Is my text sent anywhere?
- No. The searching and replacing happen in your browser, on your device. Nothing is transmitted, logged or stored. This matters here more than on most pages: the text you paste is by definition the text you did not want other people to see, and a service that collected it in order to clean it would be the exact problem it claims to solve.