Using PII Redaction

Workflows 5 min read Updated Jun 13, 2026

PII Redaction finds and removes personally identifiable information — names, emails, phone numbers, account numbers, and more — before you share a document with opposing counsel, a regulator, an auditor, or the public. Detection runs entirely on your machine, and there’s a human-in-the-loop review step so you confirm or override every redaction before anything is written.

Crucially, the export is true redaction: the underlying text is removed from the file, not just covered with a box you could copy out from underneath.

When to use it

A discovery production — redact names, emails, and phone numbers across a folder of emails, then spot-review before delivery.
A sanitized incident report — review the highlighted entities, keep the few that should remain (like a formal job title), and export a clean PDF.
Publishing case material — strip names and identifiers from a clinical case study for a journal submission.
Preparing data for an audit — redact account numbers and customer names before handing records to external auditors.

How to use it

Open the Workflows view and choose Redact PII.
Attach your document(s). Supported formats are PDF and DOCX; scanned PDFs are OCR’d automatically first.
Choose which entity types to detect (see below), then send. Tholos AI scans the document and returns a review panel.
Review every detected item, uncheck any false positives, pick how redactions should appear and the export format, then click Apply Redactions.

Entity types

Pick any combination of: Person, Email, Phone, Address, SSN / National ID, Credit card, Bank account, Date of birth, and IP address. By default the high-sensitivity set — Person, Email, Phone, SSN / National ID, and Credit card — is pre-selected, so a one-click run already catches the categories most people care about.

The review step

After detection, the document opens in a review panel:

Every detected entity is highlighted in the document, with a colour legend distinguishing each type.
A side checklist lists each item with its type and page. Everything is checked (will be redacted) by default.
Click a checklist row to jump to its highlight, or click a highlight to jump back to the row.
Uncheck anything that shouldn’t be redacted — a dimmed highlight shows it’s excluded. Use Select all / Select none to move quickly.

How redactions appear

Under Replace with, choose how redacted text is shown in the export:

Generic label — [REDACTED] (the default).
Typed label — [REDACTED:Person], which keeps a hint of what was removed.
Black bars — ███.

Set Export as to PDF (default), DOCX, or TXT, then click Apply Redactions. The redacted file is saved to your export folder (set one in Settings; otherwise it’s saved next to the source file), and you’ll get a summary of how many items were redacted, with the export path.

Because every redaction goes through the review-and-confirm step, PII Redaction is run one document at a time — it isn’t part of the unattended Batch Process view. For a large set, work through the files individually so you can verify each before export.

Checking the result

Redaction tools should never be your only line of defense — always verify the export:

Open the redacted file in a different reader and try to select or copy a redacted region. No original text should be recoverable.
Search the file for a name you redacted — it should return zero matches.
Spot-check the review checklist before applying: false positives left checked become visible redactions; missed items leave PII in the file.
For scanned PDFs, confirm the redacted regions are obscured in the underlying image, not just the text layer.

The Fully Offline badge stays visible the whole time — the document never leaves your machine.

← Back to Help Center