You can also subscribe to our e-mail newsletter and keep an eye here on The Mac Security Blog for the latest Apple security and privacy news.Ever run through an entire PDF, frantically searching for just one passage? It’s not an easy thing to do.
Be sure to follow the podcast to make sure you don’t miss any episodes! How can I learn more?Įach week on the Intego Mac Podcast, Intego’s Mac security experts discuss the latest Apple news, security and privacy stories, and offer practical advice on getting the most out of your Apple devices. So you can redact individual words, or paragraphs or pages as needed. Obviously, you’re unlikely to redact as much as I have in the above example generally, you’ll only want to hide things like email addresses, phone numbers, money amounts, or names. But as soon as you save the document, the redaction is permanent. If you hover your cursor over redacted text, you can see what the text is. You can change the redaction as you edit drag your cursor over text to add the black redaction, drag again to remove it. (It’s a good idea to not check Do not show this message again, so you are reminded of the permanence of this change each time you use it.)ĭrag your cursor over the text you want to redact, and you’ll see that it becomes black with hash marks. When you click the Redact button, Preview presents a dialog explaining what this does.įirst, make sure to make a copy of the file you want to redact once you’ve redacted text and saved the document, you cannot undo the change. You can also choose Tools > Redact, to activate the redaction tool, without engaging Markup. Open a PDF in Preview, then click the Markup button (top right), then click the Redact button (top left). It’s important to always upgrade to the newest macOS version for maximum security.) (Note that this redaction feature was introduced in macOS Big Sur, and also works in macOS Monterey or later. While this isn’t a simple process, it is fast and effective.įortunately, if you use a Mac, you have access to a much more powerful redaction tool in Preview, the app you can use for viewing PDFs and images. Essentially, it attempts to see what characters would like like when pixelated, then, through a sort of reverse engineering, figures out the original text.
It looks like this:īut a security researcher at Bishop Fox has shown that this sort of pixelization is reversible, using a simple tool. There are a number of ways you can do this, and one way that has been common for many people is using apps to pixelate the text you want to hide. For example, you may need to provide a bank statement to someone to prove you have a bank account, but not want to show the balance. Sometimes you want to share a PDF with someone, yet hide some of the information. How To Securely Redact Text in PDFs with Apple Preview on Mac
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