Redaction is crucial for many businesses and organizations. It ensures that confidential material is not viewed by outside eyes. This applies especially to those operating in the legal, financial, healthcare, and government sectors, where data security is tightly regulated.
Avoidable Mistakes
We recently saw an avoidable redaction mistake play out with the Paul Manafort case, where his attorneys mistakenly filed a court document that had portions of information that were supposed to be redacted completely but were accessible by copy and pasting the document text. And those portions revealed nuggets of information about Manafort’s ties to Russian national Konstantin Kilimnik, raising issues of impropriety.
What is Redaction?
Otherwise known as document sanitizing, redaction is the process of blacking out or removing any sensitive information from a document so it can be used and distributed, but still protect confidential information too.
Sensitive information that could be used to commit fraud or expose private information should be redacted. The following list is a general guide:
· Social security numbers
· Driver’s license or professional license numbers
· Protected health information and other medical information
· Financial documents and files
· Proprietary information or trade secrets
· Judiciary records
· Individuals’ addresses, dates and months of birth, and other personally identifiable information (PII)
Why is Redaction Important?
Nearly every industry needs redaction in some form to protect important information. However, some, like the legal industry and the government, deal with more sensitive information than others. Another example is healthcare, which is mandated by HIPAA to protect PHI (Protected Health Information) and is also required to notify affected individuals if their information is exposed—potentially crippling public relations.
Redact With ID Shield
Comply with regulatory requirements and share public records with confidence. ID Shield removes sensitive data from electronic documents, permanently and securely.
How it Works
ID Shield automates the redaction process. It reads and classifies documents the same way a human would, intelligently processing information to identify redactions based on document type. For workflows that require validation, the software can highlight clues specific to the document type and assign a value that measures how well the data matches the pattern and clues. These values, or ‘confidence’ classifications, are used to streamline verification workflows and minimize labor cost while maximizing accuracy.
ID shield is designed with flexibility in mind, which makes for easy integration with all documents and case management systems and is easily scalable in processing small or large volume projects.
Making the investment in technology can improve customer service and reduce labor costs all while responsibly protecting sensitive data in documents stored in public systems. If you’d like to learn more about how our ID Shield solution can help with this process, please reach out.
About the Author: Taylor Genter
Taylor is a Marketing Manager at Extract with experience in data analytics, graphic design, and both digital and social media marketing. She earned her Bachelor of Business Administration degree in Marketing at the University of Wisconsin- Whitewater. Taylor enjoys analyzing people’s behaviors and attitudes to find out what motivates them, and then curating better ways to communicate with them.