Guide

Remove personal data (PII) from a PDF

Before you share a document, you often need to take out the private bits: email addresses, card numbers, bank details, social security numbers, phone numbers. Doing it by hand is slow and easy to miss. Here is how to do it in one click, or to replace the data with realistic fakes so the file still looks real.

Two ways to handle it

Scrub removes the data from the file for real (like redaction), so it cannot be copied or searched. Anonymize replaces each value with a realistic fake of the same shape, so the document stays believable for demos, screenshots, or test data. The same source value always maps to the same fake, so the document stays consistent.

What it detects

Email addresses, credit card numbers, IBANs, US social security numbers, and phone numbers. Card and IBAN numbers are checksum-validated, so ordinary long numbers are left alone. You can also list specific names to swap.

Step by step

1. Open pdfblah.com and drop in your PDF.
2. Click "Scrub PII" to remove personal data, or "Anonymize" to replace it with fakes. Both are one click.
3. Preview for free. You see exactly which items were handled, highlighted, before paying.
4. Download the cleaned file.

From the command line

The same engine is open source:

pipx install pdfblah
pdfblah scrub in.pdf out.pdf                          # remove all detected PII
pdfblah anonymize in.pdf out.pdf --names "Jane Roe" --seed 7

See the pdfblah project on GitHub.