Redaction Services
Redaction is a process to digitally edit confidential data from documents containing PII (Personally Identifiable Information)
Security Trend Affects Many Documents
Privacy laws and state mandates require an increasing number of state, county and local officials to redact (delete) Social Security numbers, driver’s license numbers, financial accounts and other sensitive information from publicly available records. Several states and public companies require redaction and more are preparing to do so – creating a need for reliable, affordable solutions to edit millions of paper, filmed or electronic documents.
Commercial Documents also Impacted
Increasingly, as business related documents and data is transacted and transferred electronically, sensitive PII is exposed. Redaction of the personal information can remove much of the risk of theft or misuse of these critical data points.
Types of Forms Needing Redaction
- Property and mortgage (official) records
- Vital statistics
- Occupational licenses
- Applications
- Uniform Commercial Code filings
- Electoral rolls
- Military discharges
- Vehicle, watercraft registrations
- Driver records
- Firearm permits
- Solutions
- Software solution (OCR based)
Automated (OCR/ICR) Solution
For recent documents and incoming records, we help select the optimal OCR redaction software. OCR (optical character recognition) technology reads document images (.tif, jpg, and PDF files) and redacts specified confidential information. With high OCR accuracy on modern documents, operators need only to verify and validate hard-to-read characters that the program identifies.
Manual Solution for Challenges with Automated Processing
Manual services can be more reliable and efficient than automated solutions for handling decades-old records (as shown on the right) that may have degraded microfilm, mixes of handwriting and typing, inconsistent layouts and varied data presentation templates. Verification and correction costs can eliminate the advantage of automated redaction.
Eyes often can do a better job than software. Programs simply look for targeted numbers, keywords or certain areas on forms. “Software won’t pick up 100% of the data that needs to be redacted,” says a report in Computerworld magazine.
We have extensive experience converting older and non-standard format documents into digital archives for financial, insurance, health care and government clients. Trained technicians and data entry operators routinely handle microfilm, microfiche, vintage computer tapes, file cards, photocopies and documents with low-quality typing or handwriting. Our project teams are able to verify OCR results or manually redact each document to achieve accuracy above 99.5% — at highly attractive labor rates.
(Audited Annually)
