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Documentation Changelog
Document Redaction

Document Redaction: clean documents before sharing

How BeeSensible's Document Redaction module works and what it produces.

Het_Grote_PII-Dossier.pdfOpen another...BeeSensible Pro 130%4 / 23Draw box

Friday night - Emergency Department

It was pouring when the first ambulance pulled into the grounds of St. Catherine's Hospital on Maple Avenue 112 in Riverside at 19:42. Nurse Sophie Lambert, staff number MED-4471, wiped her hands and took a deep breath.

On the stretcher lay Michael Brennan, a 34-year-old plasterer. Born on March 11, 1992, living at Elm Street 47, Riverside. He gave a mobile number that Sophie quickly noted: +1 415 555 0148. His record number, 184629375, was already in the system.

Search detections
85 found · 85 selectedDeselect all
PERSON28
Sophie Lambert
Michael Brennan
Sophie
LOCATION21
St. Catherine's Hospital
Maple Avenue 112
Riverside
Elm Street 47
DATE14
March 11, 1992
PHONE8
+1 415 555 0148
MRN8
184629375
EMPLOYEE_ID6
MED-4471
85 items will be removedPreviewAnonymise (85)
Review each finding in a document and remove, replace, or mask it before you share.

Document Redaction lets your team open a document, see exactly what sensitive data it contains, and produce a clean version before sharing it or sending it to an AI tool.

What it does

  1. A user opens the Document Redaction tool in the desktop app, or the Documents section of the dashboard.
  2. They open or upload a PDF.
  3. BeeSensible scans the document and highlights sensitive data: names, IBANs, BSNs, addresses, and anything else in your active detection profile.
  4. The user chooses what to do with each finding: remove it, replace it with a placeholder, or leave it in.
  5. The tool produces a clean copy.

The original document is never modified. The clean copy is a separate file.

Redaction profiles

A redaction profile is a named, reusable set of the data types BeeSensible looks for in a document. Each profile simply turns entity types on or off, grouped by category (names, financial, health, and so on). Unlike the detection profiles in Realtime Privacy, document profiles have no per-app rules and no severity levels: they only decide what gets found.

BeeSensible ships a built-in profile to start from. It is marked BeeSensible and cannot be edited or deleted. From Documents > Profiles an admin can add their own with New profile, give it a name and description, and toggle exactly which types it detects.

One profile is the default, marked with a star. The default is applied automatically whenever anyone redacts a document, and it shows as the organisation default in the redaction toolbar. To change it, open Profiles and choose Set default on another profile.

When someone redacts a document, they can switch to another available profile from the toolbar for that document, so a stricter or lighter profile is one click away without changing the organisation default.

Where processing happens

Document Redaction can run on-device or in the EU cloud, depending on your organisation's setting:

  • On-device. The desktop app processes the document entirely on the user's machine. The text does not leave the device.
  • EU cloud. The document is sent to BeeSensible's servers inside the EU, processed in working memory, and discarded. Nothing is stored.

Both modes use the same detection and produce the same result. The active mode is shown at the bottom of the redaction panel.

Which engine runs

Document Redaction uses the same detection engines as Realtime Privacy: Bombus, the preferred engine, with Osmia as the automatic fallback. Both cover the same 65 data types. The engine is an organisation-level setting, not something you pick per document. See Detection engines for how Bombus and Osmia differ.

Supported document types

BeeSensible Document Redaction supports PDF files. Scanned PDFs without a text layer (no OCR) are not supported yet.

What the admin sees

Document Redaction activity appears in the admin dashboard as a count of documents processed and the types of sensitive data found. No document content is ever sent to the dashboard. Counts are aggregated per user and per document type.

Who can use it

Document Redaction is available to all team members who have the extension or desktop app installed. No special configuration is required beyond having the module enabled in your organisation's settings.